Huddle ~ Work Better Together

A Kind of Magic – quadrant magic

Big news. Huddle.net was named in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software this month. The Gartner Magic Quadrant, for those who don’t know, is a tool designed to provide an unbiased qualitative analysis of markets’ direction, maturity and participants. It’s a serious benchmark for any enterprise buyers.

Huddle operates in the team collaboration and web conference market, as well as the social software sub-segment. The worldwide web conference and team collaboration software market revenue is on pace to reach $2 billion in 2008, that’s $500.3 million in EMEA alone.

But no technology is ‘recession proof’, IDC says. They expect many organisations to freeze IT-related projects. The good news is that these organisations will recognise that much more could be achieved with Web/Enterprise 2.0 technologies. IDC calls it a ‘bail out’ for enterprise collaboration, we call it common sense. Repeat after me: Yes, we can!

Because we cannot show you the real one…

Show me the love

Do you love Huddle? We love you too. We love you even if you don’t love us back.

Show us your love. Nominate Huddle in the Mashable Awards. Click here to vote. We are counting on you!

Join us on LinkedIn in the I heart Huddle group . Lots of goodies coming this way.

The debate continues … on Huddle Workspaces

Have you used discussions on Huddle Workspaces for LinkedIn yet? You can add it them here http://bit.ly/huddle and start the debate now.

Discussions in Huddle Workspaces are exactly like conversations or web forums – they’re the perfect place to discuss issues, solve problems, share links, send messages and post announcements. So instead of emails flying around the office – getting lost in junk mail, replies being forgotten or not sent, a discussion allows you to keep track of all responses in a secure location and ensures you have this archived as long as you need it.

So here’s how it works. Add Huddle Workspaces to your LinkedIn profile http://bit.ly/huddle. Invite a few connections to start a discussion.

To start a discussion click the ‘New Discussion’ button, and give the discussion a title – then write your message underneath. Once you’re done you will see a link to ‘notify’ the users in the workspace and invite them to join the discussion. Then click create discussion – this will take you to a screen showing your initial discussion post.

Clicking on the main Discussions tab will display the full list of discussions already in progress. From here you can see the title, date and time the discussion was created and by whom. On the right you also see the number of replies so far and who the most recent post was added by. To view the discussion just click the title.

If you want to add a reply to one of the discussions in the list then you just need to click the Reply button – this will open a similar box as adding the first discussion post. All users who are part of the discussion will automatically be notified once your post is submitted.

Another great thing. If you click the “Link existing Huddle.net account” link at the top of the LinkedIn Huddle Workspaces page this will automatically synch changes you make in the application with your main Huddle account (or vice versa). So if you have workspaces set up with LinkedIn connections as well as colleagues on Huddle you can keep up to date with them all!

Sparky Microsoft

It’s official. Microsoft loves start-ups. The company has just announced it’d give away free software to start-ups for a silly $100 (£63).

The scheme is called BizSpark and is open to any start-ups with less than £630,000 in turnover. In addition to free software, start-ups will benefit from more visibility on the tech scene and raised profile as a part of BizSpark DB. Our Andy has already taken advantage of it commenting on Microsoft’s new venture along with Steve Ballmer in today’s Daily Telegraph.

Shame this hasn’t happened two years ago, it would have saved us tens of thousands of pounds. But good things come to those who wait, I guess.

The biggest question now: will start-ups love Microsoft back?