Recently in Social software Category

CrowdGather (OTCBB:CRWG), announced that it has completed a beta deployment of its new content management system (CMS) for forum owners. By implementing its proprietary forum CMS CrowdReport, CrowdGather immediately increases a particular site's visual appeal to members, visitors, and advertisers. More importantly, the CMS enhances the user-experience by converting user-generated content into zero-cost editorial content for the site. CrowdGather expects to have deployed the CMS on its busiest sites by the end of February. http://www.crowdgather.com

LinkedIn announced a partnership with IBM's Lotus to integrate LinkedIn's functionality and networking capabilities with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and the just announced LotusLive.com. The companies will work together to provide Lotus customers, including Lotus Notes users, new ways to interact with their trusted professional network. Professionals will be able to start web meetings, add business context to e-mail senders, and learn more about collaborators, colleagues, potential partners and prospects through integrated LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn plans to integrate with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections, and LotusLive.com. LotusLive will bring its collaboration capabilities to professionals on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn integration will be available at no additional cost to Lotus users. The partnership is non-exclusive. http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/01/19/linkedin-and-lotus-partner-to-improve-enterprise-software

Cerego announced the North American beta launch of iKnow! iKnow! helps people to "learn faster, remember longer, and manage their memory for a lifetime". iKnow!'s patented learning algorithms generate personalized learning schedules that improve the absorption and recall of chunks of learning content called "items." Combining cognitive science and neuroscience with the social nature of the web, iKnow! lets users remix the web for the purpose of learning. iKnow! measures memory strength and generates a personalized learning schedule optimized for each user. The iKnow! platform is a collaborative network that will allow learners all over the globe to leverage and remix content produced by the community. As a demonstration of its social learning platform, iKnow! currently offers a set of tools and content for English speakers to study Japanese, with support for other major language pairs to follow within the year. Users soon will be able to upload any kind of learning content into the system - language and otherwise - and Cerego will open its learning APIs to the developer community. This will let third-party developers take advantage of the system's memory management capabilities and build custom applications tailored to specific domains. http://www.iknow.co.jp/

Zoho announced Zoho Share, a central repository that aggregates and lists all business and personal user content published in Zoho Show presentations, Zoho Sheet spreadsheets, and Zoho Writer documents and PDFs. Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show give users several options to share and publish their content, including sharing it with select users, embedding it in a blog or making it public and accessible to anyone online. Published content, however, remains in the individual Zoho applications, with no single point of access to all published content, regardless of type or author. Zoho Share gathers all the Zoho users' content published in the individual Zoho applications and makes it available from a central interface. When Zoho Business moves out of private beta, Zoho Share will serve as the dashboard for all published content within an organization. When users first arrive at Zoho Share they will find the following tabs across the top of the homepage: Content - displays all presentations, documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files published by Zoho users. Each content type can be sorted by criteria that include featured, recent, popular, top rated, and license based; People - shows all Zoho users who have published content. These content authors can be sorted by top contributors, recent users, and all users. Clicking on an author's name reveals all content published by that author; My Area - displays all of the individual user's files, both private and public. Users can also edit their files and publish content that was previously private; Upload - lets users publish desktop files directly to Zoho Share. Users can define the license type for their uploaded content. From the Upload page, users can select from "all rights reserved," "public domain," and six variations of "attribution." Users do not need a Zoho account to view published content on Zoho Share. Publishing content, however, requires a Zoho account as does posting messages and adding comments. http://www.zoho.com, http://www.adventnet.com

Six Apart announced the availability of Movable Type 4.2 and with it the debut of Movable Type Pro (MT Pro), a product that combines Movable Type's advanced blogging tools and content management system with social networking features so any website or blog owner can create a social network by letting their readers and visitors become members of their sites, with profiles and the ability to rate content and follow each other. Movable Type Pro makes building a community possible for anyone, including publishers, individual bloggers, educational institutions, small and medium-sized businesses or large enterprises. Site owners can build community blogs, in which members create their own posts, or forums, in which members participate using the same profile and avatars used throughout the site. The release of Movable Type 4.2 introduces major improvements to the Movable Type platform, including: enhanced performance: common tasks are "up to 100 times faster" than on previous versions; simplified default templates that make it easy to get up and running quickly; and a built-in free open source antispam product, TypePad Antispam. In addition, improved search and threaded commenting are included in the release. Movable Type 4.2 is available under a free, open source license or as part of Movable Type Pro. Six Apart also offers Movable Type Enterprise, which adds support for Oracle and SQL Server databases and LDAP on top of Movable Type Pro features. Movable Type is available in English, Japanese, French, German, Dutch, and Spanish. It is free to bloggers and to K-12 schools, with an option to purchase support for $99. It is available to businesses in 5-author and 20-author licenses, for $395.95 and $1499.95, respectively. Discounts for non-profit institutions are available. The free, open source version of Movable Type can be downloaded from the Movable Type community site at http://www.movabletype.org. http://www.movabletype.com, http://www.sixapart.com/

LiveWorld, Inc. announced that it has launched its next suite of APIs for its social network platform. LiveAPI 2.0 enables digital agencies and corporate inhouse web development groups to build, manage and flexibly change web sites on top of LiveWorld's Community Center platform for social networks. LiveAPI 2.0 combines a large set of APIs with a social network platform, and provides digital development groups with: Ability to build, customize and change a site on top of LiveWorld's social network platform; integration of community content into any web page; standards based with Secure Transaction Model: XML or JSON Format, SOAP Protocol; API based pricing: LiveAPI 2.0 comes with a pricing model based on API calls instead of full page view rates. The underlying platform is the same one deployed for LiveWorld's Community Center. LiveAPI 2.0 comes with documentation, sample code, access to a sandbox development environment and membership in LiveWorld's API developer community. http://www.liveworld.com

Google announced that Knol is now open to everyone. They announced Knol back in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. From their blog post: "The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good. With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it! Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements. We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker's extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics." http://knol.google.com

Jaspersoft announced the open beta of its new JasperForge, a community platform that will support the open source BI community with tools for community stakeholders - from developers to business users. JasperForge uses EssentiaESP, a community engagement platform developed by Essentia. The new JasperForge uses a social networking approach to provide an intuitive experience that makes it easier for users to join or start a project, interact with the community around it, and move that project forward. By working with Essentia, Jaspersoft is able to take advantage of collaborative development, communications and social networking tools that enable discussions, tagging, surveys, wikis, news, blogs, mailing lists and more. Advanced banners, e- commerce and cataloging are also built into the new forge. New features include: Personalized experience with MyPages. Wikis, karma points, monitoring, and customizable home pages; Ecosystem Enablement. To enhance the network effect of the new Jaspersoft community, including customers and partners, members can use built-in tools and project space, or link projects, tools, or artifacts directly from the new JasperForge via a new Ecosystem Enablement feature. With Ecosystem Enablement, users can loosely couple internal projects with outside partners, the open source community of contributors and reviewers, business partners, and suppliers; Rich Content Management is now extended to every user, every tool and every page in the new JasperForge. http://www.jaspersoft.com/

Near-Time, announced availability of its community widget, Connection, for Webex Connect. The Near-Time Connection widget provides enterprise 2.0 capabilities to the WebEx Connect collaboration environment. WebEx is working with Near-Time to bring together real-time and near-time collaboration as well as text based and rich-media interaction. Near-Time integrates Web forums, weblogs, wikis and file sharing in acustomizable on-demand platform. The Near-Time Connection widget enables users to access new information in their communities, create wiki and weblog posts, make comments to forums, as well as receive and play podcasts. In addition to running in WebEx Connect, the Near-Time Connection widget runs on mobile devices running Safari or Opera browsers and iGoogle Web pages. Near-Time's support for rich media in its wikis and blogs allows for customers to save and publish their WebEx Connect sessions and conferences privately or to the Web. The combination of WebEx Connect and Near-Time means users can span client, on-demand and mobile Web collaboration. Near-Time Connection is one of the many applications users will be able to access through the WebEx Connect unified communications client. WebEx Connect will enable users to integrate data from multiple applications into collaborative workspaces, custom designed for their particular workflows and business processes. http://www.near-time.com/

Vetafab Software announces the U.S. release of lexiCan 2.0 a Wikipedia-like knowledge management system for organizing content including text, Outlook mails, images, tables, web links, PDFs, PowerPoint content and more. lexiCan organizes content in an A-Z index that doesn't nest and hide file names. Using a simple drag and drop, or copy and paste format, lexiCan users can outline and structure all kinds of information into Wiki-like articles. Hyper-linking is enabled between articles so information is never lost or difficult to find. Articles are saved in an intuitive A- Z index by title, with cross-referencing, or under multiple naming classifications for fast searching. All or part of lexiCan articles can be exported as HTML for the Web, or viewing in Microsoft Word. Features include: Convenient two-pane document window with file and directory; full-text search capability, including attachments; two-clicks to HTML for fast Web publishing, including embedded files; glossary and A-Z index, a Wiki-like encyclopedia on your desktop. http://www.lexican.net