Ideas and reviews for websites, film, business, products, and designMicroblog your ideas and be discovered

We’re seeing a few glimpses from Mix10 of what Windows Phone 7 Series will look like for the enterprise. Perhaps most compelling is the continued emphasis on creating an experience more so than an enterprise “phone.” It appears that Microsoft has learned a lesson that is more apparent every day. People want smartphones as much for personal use as for business use. Sponsor But Microsoft is saying little about what it does plan for the enterprise with its Windows Phone 7 Series. They say more is to come in the next few weeks but clearly the emphasis is on the consumer market, not the enterprise. Network World did a little sniffing around Mix10 and did get a few tidbits of what we should expect: Windows Phone 7 is no longer enterprise-centric but the user experience is still catching the fancy of independent software vendors that want to sell it into the business market. The iPhone and Google Android are proof enough that people will find relevance for smartphones in the enterprise even if the devices are meant primarily for consumers. A developer community is ready and waiting to make applications for Windows Phone 7. Developers can create applications within a development environment they understand. Network World notes: “Visual Studio programmers can drag and drop controls onto a Windows Phone surface, bring in existing Silverlight libraries or Azure cloud projects, and wire them up to data sources, behaviors and services, just like they do when writing software for a Windows PC.” Microsoft is expected to offer a secure area within its Marketplace to accomodate enterprise applications. The intention wold be to provide a place where enterprise customers could download company specific software or the framework for their own marketplace. This would provide IT administrators with ways to administer applications within the enterprise. It’s uncertain what security features will become part of Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has historically provided Microsoft Exchange Active Sync which enables Windows Mobile devices the ability to sync with Microsoft Exchange. Actice Sync has offered a number of security features such as remote data wipe and encrypted connections. Will this rich security framework be kept intact? With such a consumer focus, it’s uncertain what will come of it. Windows Phone 7 includes an Office Hub, allowing people to create and edit Microsoft Office documents. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making Sharepoint a mobile site. Windows Phone 7 will integrate with Microsoft Exchange. It appears users may set up tiles within Windows Phone 7 to edit and share Sharepoint documents. It appears that Microsoft may not necessarily have to focus on the enterprise. Its rich user experience may be enough to get people interested. Core enterprise features will only help give Windows Phone 7 a chance to compete more effectively. Discuss

Google just introduced an interesting new feature for Google Calendar: Smart Rescheduler. This new feature, which will be available in Google Calendar Labs today, will automatically find the best time to reschedule a meeting. If you have ever tried to reschedule a meeting that includes more than two people, a conference room, equipment and a team that is distributed across multiple time zones, you know how hard this can be. With Smart Rescheduler, Google Calendar will give you a set of alternative dates based on a ranking algorithm that keeps everybody’s availability and other criteria in mind. Sponsor Rescheduling Meetings Doesn’t Have to be Hard As Ken Norton, Google’s product manager for Google Calendar, told us yesterday, the Calendar team decided to tackle this problem after realizing how much time administrative assistants spend on trying to reschedule meetings every day. Starting today, Smart Rescheduler will be available as a Calender Labs product for all Google Calender users (including all Google Apps users with access to Calendar Labs). Now, assuming your team uses Google Calendar, you can simply click on “Find a new time” and Google will present you with a list of the most appropriate times for a new meeting. The algorithm will rank alternative times based on criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms and time zones. As Norton told us, the algorithm is actually quite complex and will also suggest a new meeting time when two participants in a larger meetings are scheduled for a one-on-one meeting at the same time or when there is a scheduling conflict but a meeting participant hasn’t RSVPed to this other meeting yet. Users can also refine the search criteria by changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts and by setting the earliest and latest date for the rescheduled meeting. It’s interesting that Google is only using this algorithm to reschedule meetings for now. It would also be interesting to see how well this system would work for scheduling meetings in the first place. Discuss

Remember when Jesse James was competing on Celebrity Apprentice , and Donald Trump called him out because he wasn’t calling on his high profile contacts (especially his movie star wife Sandra Bullock ) during the show’s  fund-raising challenges? Well, now that Jesse and Sandra Bullock’s marriage trouble is the biggest celebrity story in the news, a Radar Online source is supposedly shedding some light on Jesse’s decision to leave Sandra out of  Celebrity Apprentice. The former boss and confidant of Jesse’s supposed mistress Michelle “Bombshell” McGee told Radar, “[Michelle] told me that Jesse’s marriage to Sandra Bullock was for publicity, and that’s why he did Donald Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice . He never called on Sandra for money or influence because their marriage was a sham she said.” We don’t know if we can believe the ex-boss of the mistress of the married reality star, but this whole Jesse cheating scandal is disappointing to say the least. Did reality TV fool us into thinking the Monster Garage star was this great guy when he’s really a fame-whoring user? Say it ain’t so! Also see: Sandra Bullock and Jesse James Marriage Profile Did Sandra Bullock Marriage Trouble Affect Jesse James’s Performance on Celebrity Apprentice? originally appeared on About.com Reality TV on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 12:45:43. Permalink | Comment | Email this

Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context – that’s what we’re looking for in the journalism we read, isn’t it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use. NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews . The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app! Sponsor When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it’s easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined. The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust. The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It’s one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it’s another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality. The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It’s a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing. NewsTrust and MyNews aren’t for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.) Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content. Discuss

Google Apps is offering migration for Microsoft Exchange. The service is free with Google Apps Premiere or Google Apps Education. Last July, Google Apps began offering migration from IBM’s Lotus Notes. Most enterprises are standardized on either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, which means that Google now pretty much can migrate any organization to the cloud. Google also offers connection to Blackberry Enterprise Server.Google Apps is providing migration for Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007. Sponsor Microsoft has very limited capability to offer a cloud-based email environment. Most of the offerings it provides are locally installed, single-hosting services. Concerns will wane about cloud security. The ability to offer a cloud-based email environment for easy access will be the norm, not the exception. But even though Google has a jump, Microsoft will have its own offering. In the meantime, Google has an opportunity to make another leap into the enterprise. This does represent a tipping point for many companies shedding IT assets. The question about email often comes up when companies consider moving to the cloud. It’s an important part of the migration. In recent weeks, we have seen how email is becoming a foundation for the evolution of a web oriented, social enterprise. Google Apps Marketplace offers the capability to offer third party applications that integrate with Google Apps. Email is a critical part of the equation in this Google ecosystem. It provides a backbone for companies to connect its employees with Google Apps and the associated third-parties. The process to migrate looks relatively simple. Through Google Apps, a customer enters their Microsoft Exchange user name and what it calls “two-legged OAuth,” consisting of a consumer user key and a consumer “secret”. They then upload a .CSV file consisting of the email adresses, calendar and contact information. It is optional what to migrate. For example, an IT administrator may upload email addresses and contact data but not the calendar. Email service does not get interrupted during the migration. This is a compelling offering for companies moving to the cloud. But it’s only part of the equation. Google still needs to prove it is robust enough for the enterprise to migrate to Google Apps. In the meantime, Microsoft needs to act fast and provide a cloud offering that at least gives its own community the option to move Microsoft Exchange to the cloud. Discuss