While SaaS has allowed businesses to quickly and inexpensively deploy applications, it is bringing with it a new twist on an old problem—integration. 

Flashback to July 1, 2003, where Christopher Koch in “A Critical Look at IBM's On-Demand Computing Marketing Campaign” on cio.com wrote: 

Fast forward, where we see that each new round of technology over the past two decades—from Business Process Reengineering to Internet Computing to e-Business On Demand to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)—was supposed to solve the problem and deliver agility through easy integration. But it never happened.

Enter the cloud and SaaS, which emerged as the latest and best hope for achieving agility by enabling companies to offload to an external provider all the headaches of deploying and managing computer systems.

But it appears that the age-old problem has again reared its ugly head. As Herman Mehling wrote, “The number one cloud and SaaS challenge for many developers and organizations might just surprise you. It's not security, lack of standards, or even reliability, but... dramatic drum roll... integration.”

Indeed, there is a rising chorus of analysts warning about a new wave of gnarly integration problems being ushered in by SaaS. Among them is Loraine Lawson, who wrote, “I just can't help but think organizations may be repeating in the cloud the same integration mistakes they made with on-premise databases and computer systems years ago.” 

Ravi Kalakota calls the SaaS integration problem the “cloud in-the-corner syndrome” and writes: “CIOs have seen this ‘cloud in the corner’ and data silo problem too many times in the past. They know how this movie is likely to unfold. Data quality and integration issues — aggregating data from the myriad sources and services within an organization.”

What some analysts are promoting is that SaaS vendors will solve the integration problem on their end via what is called iPaaS (integration platform as a service). Says Herman Mehling, “New iPaaS offerings aim to relieve the pain of SaaS and cloud integration, which has been so onerous that many organizations have pulled the plug on SaaS projects.”

However, iPaaS is only one apraoch. As Gartner analyst Benoit Lheureux relates, “A recurring theme with users integrating multiple SaaS applications is whether to put the integration solution ‘center of gravity’ on-premise – or in the cloud. And whether to implement the solution themselves – or with the help of an external provider.”

What users tend to be getting from analysts are perplexing lists of SaaS integration providers and possibilities. As Hollis Tibbetts writes of Gartner’s prescriptions for SaaS integration, “They present a bewildering array of options (not all of which are available to organizations, many which will not be available for a long time) and then just leave people potentially hanging in a state of confusion.”

SaaS integration seems to be shaping up as a replay of IT business as usual—requiring expensive service engagements performed by third-party systems integrators. This can be seen in the arms race taking place as large vendors like IBM, Cisco, Google, Dell, HP, and others gobble up the promising new vendors that have arisen to provide SaaS integration—Cast Iron Systems, Boomi, Informatica, SnapLogic, Jitterbit, et al. 

We’ve reached a stage in which new SaaS solutions are emerging that offer new twists and unique angles on solution areas. One such service is Backupify, which is differentiating itself from the rest of the online data backup pack by providing a cloud-based online backup service that backs up customers’ cloud-based data applications.

Unlike services like Dropbox, Backblaze, and SugarSync, Backupify does not back up the data on your computer disk drives. Rather, Backupify only backs up popular cloud-based services—such Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Google Apps.

Backupify was launched in 2008 with a consumer-oriented focus and initially only backed up users’ social media accounts.

Seeing a market for backup of critical business applications, Backupify expanded into business apps with backup for Google Apps. “Some people believe their Gmail data is backed up by Google but that is not completely true,” said Krisin Dziadul, a marketing analyst at Backupify.

"Google does have redundant servers but they can't protect against unforseen errors such as accidental deletions," she explained. "It's also always a good  practice to have a third party backup tool on a service unrelated to the service you are using so that if anything happens on that service, you know you are protected elsewhere."

Many companies continue to keep employee Gmail accounts open even after the employee leaves, which costs the company $50 per year per user account. With Snapshot for Google Apps, they can save that cost by backing up the data and closing the account or transferring it to another employee, she said.

Backupify is expanding further into the business arena by offering backup for Salesforce.com accounts. Dziadul said the Salesforce offering was just finished its beta phase and would go live in the June timeframe. Backup for more business-critical apps are likely to follow, she said.

The backup process is fairly simple. Users give Backupify access to their application accounts (much like users sign up by giving applications access to their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts), and Backupify performs the data backup, typically daily, and you log into your account for access. One nice feature allows you to receive the complete contents of an account in a zip file with a single click.

Pricing is reasonable. For example, pricing for the Google Apps service (which includes Google Docs, Calendar, Contacts, Sites, Gmail, and Picasa) starts at $3 per user per month for 25 GB of storage. A free offering is available for 1 GB and email only.

Backupify offers plans for social media that include email, phone, and web data. A plan for 5 accounts with 10 GB storage is $4.99 per month, and a plan for 25 accounts and 50 GB is $19.99 per month.

Backupify offers a 15-day free trial, so you can test-drive the service to see how you like it.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' Online Data Backup service rankings.

Among the innovative SaaS solutions that have emerged are the project management solutions from Wrike and LiquidPlanner. 

There are numerous products that have emerged to allow companies to create internal social media networks, including Yammer, which pioneered the niche. These solutions tend to give companies Facebook-like application through which employees can engage socially.

However, as one reviewer noted, “With so many ‘social’ applications available and for free it seems that there is not much creativity in offering innovative functionality.”

Enter Tibbr, Tibco’s powerful entry into the enterprise social arena. Launched a little over a year ago, and three years after the debut of Yammer, the innovation that Tibbr brought to the space has surprised many critics.

As Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz wrote, “Tibco? Really? (Sarcasm) Yes. Tibco. Really. (Sarcasm swallowed).”

As our rankings show, Tibbr has muscled its way to the top by dazzling users with a rich array of integration features packaged in a well-designed user interface.

Tibbr’s big selling points are its enterprise application integration and customization capabilities. Tibbr enables users to follow topics and “event streams” through a dashboard that draws data from different data sources—including CRM, ERP, RSS, and social media systems such as Facebook and Twitter. 

Appreciation of these integration capabilities, as well as quick and easy implementation, is reflected in user reviews.

Yammer, which began life as a "Twitter for the enterprise"  tool and expanded, continues to be considered mostly a social networking and communication app like Facebook.

In the face of Tibbr’s competition, Yammer has expanded its features set to provide file sharing, data backup, customer support, and more, mainly through integration with apps like Box, Expensify, and Zendesk. Yammer also touts its enterprise integration capabilities, such as the ability to embed Yammer feeds within a business application.

Pricewise, Yammer’s base offerings are less expensive (a free version and Business version at $5 per user per month), but its Enterprise offering requires a sales consultation for a price quote.  

Tibbr pricing starts at $12 per user per month. 

Bottom Line: If you are looking primarily for an internal social networking tool, then a free or fee-based Yammer solution may fit the bill. If you want more sophisticated access and integration to corporate systems, with event and subject monitoring, and have the means to pay for it, Tibbr may be your choice.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' Social Enterprise Platform rankings.

There are companies that sell Facebook likes, putting out tweets like the following to advertise them:

• —Buy 5,000 Facebook Fans/ Like on your Facebook fan page account within 7 Days time #RETWEET #SMM bit.ly/nBaeuU
• —Buy 10,000 REAL Facebook Fans direct to your Facebook fan page within 1-2 weeks! 
• —Buy Facebook Likes from us at excellent prices with fast and guaranteed delivery. 

The question is, are Facebook likes worth buying?

A recent study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that less than 1% of fans of the largest brands actually engage with those brands on Facebook. As Matthew Creamer of Ad Age reported, for even the sexiest brands, in most cases, less than 1% of fans engage with the brand.  

“This,” said Creamer, “confirmed something many readers already suspected: Facebook fan bases and actual engagement aren’t the same thing.”

A number of reports have cast doubt on Facebook’s active member numbers and its methods of defining active users.

The implications of low engagement are that the cost and effort put into obtaining numerous Facebook likes may not be worth it. Moreover, buying advertising on Facebook is of less value to brands if the audience is not engaged.

As Karen Nelson-Field told Matthew Creamer, the very tiny rate of engagement found across so many big brands in the Ehrenberg-Bass study is significant. The ultimate question, as she noted, is the cost effectiveness of engaging such a low percentage of fans.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software rankings.

“She’s so dull, rip her to shreds” is a line from a Blondie song.

The same sentiment is seen in the many tomes and articles that tell you how banal boring, and off-base your marketing is and how to fix it.

A classic work in this genre is "Your Marketing Sucks" by Mark Stevens. As his book’s blurb informs us, his main thesis is that most companies don't have a clue about good marketing. In the critiques and counseling he offers, Stevens “bashes marketers' conventional wisdom with an almost immoderate glee.” 

In the same vein, a new article entitled “Why Your Customers Are Just Not That Into You” by Dan Kohn describes a Pitney Bowes survey that asked 6,000 consumers across France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United  States what they felt were the marketing turnoffs and missteps. 

Among the marketing activities that those surveyed said were annoying were: asking customers to support a brand's charity or ethical concerns; sending offers via third parties; encouraging interaction with other consumers via an online community; inviting consumers to create their own homepage; sending weekly emails; and letting your call center reps get too chummy on the phone.

Another example in the “dis your marketing” genre is “Your Marketing Stinks” by Jori Yoffie, who tells us that no one believes corporations anymore, that traditional marketing is “push, push, push,” and that mass communiction is no longer controlled by the media.

Ironically, these observations, as with many we now find in this genre, are themselves hackneyed. Much of the insight Yoffie provides is repackaged messaging from the "Cluetrain Manifesto" and all similar books by Seth Godin, ala “Meatball Sundae” et al.  

Similar tired messaging is found in the many articles targeted at social media marketing, such as "4 Reasons Why Your Business Sucks at Social Media" by Perry Sheraw. While her criticism and advice are sound, it's criticism and advice we’ve seen over and over again—essentially, be active, be relevant to your audience, be persistent and patient, etc.

Marketing hubs like Business2Commuity are full of these types of “X Reasons Why Your Marketing Sucks” articles, and after a while the redundancy of the messages, as well as the “X Reasons Why” formula, becomes tedious. I often have clicked on an article filled with hope but come away disappointed by another first-grade-level primer or rehash of fairly obvious points that have been made many times before.

A sub-species of this genre are articles that tell you what actions and habits are annoying on Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn, etc.  An example is “7 Social Media Tips: What Not To Do On Twitter” by Jesse Pennington.  Many of the annoyances Pennington describes are common complaints—don’t let your Twitter avatar remain an egg, don’t tweet only about your company, don’t send auto-responses to new followers. 

A lot of these sins are debatable and arguably legitimate actions. While everyone is entitled to their personal gripes, portraying them as universal wrongs is another matter. 

So there, I’ve criticized negative citicsm by injecting a little negative criticsm of my own.

All in all, negative headlines tend to titillate and attract readers. Just as it does in politics, going negative in marketing critiques works just as well.

So as spring arrives, we can expect the "slam your marketing" genre to continue to produce fresh flowerings sprouting on marketing forums across the Internet.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software rankings.

Among the many web hosting companies, Bluehost and HostGator stand out for the reputation they have earned for customer service, ease of use, affordability, and dependability. 

Pricing and features of the basic plans that Bluehost and HostGator offer are fairly equivalent. They each offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth, a similar control panel, plus an assortment of popular publishing platforms and programming language support. 

While their basic website hosting plans are similar, beyond that there are differences. 

Bluehost’s hosting service and pricing is simpler: It offers one basic plan at one low price. Price wars in the web hosting arena are common, and the pricing for Bluehost’s plan just got lower as it cut its price from $6.95 per month to $3.95 per month. 

Some reviewers complain that Bluehost’s pricing is lower only when you pay annually rather than monthly, but either way the price is still quite low. 

While Bluehost previously had not offered reseller plans, it now offers three reseller plans priced at $19.95, $49.95, and $99.95 per month. 

Bluehost still does not offer a dedicated server plan, only shared server hosting. 

HostGator offers more plans, starting at $3.96 per month for a single domain. Its plan for multiple domains starts at $6.36 per month, and the more feature-rich Business plan starts at $10.36 per month. 

HostGator provides dedicated server and reseller plans, with dedicated servers priced at $174, $219, $279, and $374, with discounts for the first month. 

HostGator’s reseller plans are priced starting at $24.95 per month and run up to $99.95 per month, depending on the amount of disk space and bandwidth. 

While providing excellent customer service is a key reason for the popularity of both of these services, the praise that HostGator receives is especially impressive. 

Hostgator also has a reputation as a more robust, scalable, and slightly more reliable service, with users citing its uptime guarantees as an appealing feature.

A number of Bluehost users pointed to its CPU throttling technology as the cause of slow performance they have experienced under heavier loads. 

You can see more limited bandwidth reflected in Bluehost’s reseller plans, which offer 15 Mbps, 25 Mbps, and 35 Mbps, vs. HostGator’s 500 GB, 700 GB, 1,000 GB, 1,200 GB, and 1,400 GB reseller offerings. 

The two services are continually battling in pricing and special offers. Bluehost currently is offering $75 in Google Adwords credit, while HostGator is offering a $100 credit. 

Bottom Line: Both services are solid, affordable, and have good reputations. Bluehost is more limited in the one-size-fits-all basic plan it offers. HostGator has a reputation for more robust scalability, performance, and guartanteed availability. While both services have loyal followings, HostGator, in particular, receives impressive accolades for customer service from its users.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of hosting servicess for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' hosting services reviews and rankings.

 

You can learn a lot from reading marketing copy. In my travels across the marketsphere, checking out sites and shopping for gifts, I come across marketing copy that arrests, mesmerizes, and even edifies.

Take for example, this excerpt from “Alluring fashion ladies slips” on Just Women Clothing.com.

“Spaghetti straps, lace and embroidery slips add glamour to a woman when she wears them. It gives a lady a feeling of self consciousness and confidence.”

Who knew that women’s lingerie could impart such power?

There is a poetic and cinematic quality as well in the marketing copy. This line, for example, seems perfectly suited for a Will Ferrell character:

“A lady seems extremely beautiful in her ladies slip that clings to the bosom expressing her mild and beautiful feminine shape, and then it goes down to express the beautiful contours of the hips and the bottom making her irresistibly charming.”

But alas, this exquisite and empowering fashion has become an endangered species in post-modern society. The slip, we learn, is “definitely alluring and beautiful but many a lady has deserted it for the love of tattoos and low-hip jeans exposing their natural body shape directly.”

We learn further, sadly, that the slip “has slowly faded out of the market and it is quite weird to ask for ladies slips these days in stores.”

Who knew?

The swings and contrasts of high and low fashion lead us to ruminate on the muddled mingling of high and low culture in modern society, a topic explored by John Seabrook in "Nobrow."

But wait. Not all ladies have submitted to the tyranny and whims of fashion.

“In this world of hip hop the irresistible and alluring ladies slips that express femininity by showing the ladies slim contours and feminine shape have been sidelined by many except a few ladies who still cling to the traditional slips to make up their best dress attire.”

Yes, bold traditionalists have defied the fad and embraced the classic beauty that the slip affords.

“These few ladies do enjoy their femininity wearing beautiful lace or silk slips that are graceful and exceedingly elegant.”

Who are the true rebels here?

In the PBS production “Woody Allen: a Documentary,” Woody reveals how his recognition of women as people--what they said and how they thought and felt—radically changed his approach to film making and caused him to take a women’s perspective in his films.

Similarly, a deeper reading of this fashion copy reveals layers of meaning, poetry, and social insight beyond what might be perceived as mere marketing fluff. The feminine mind and mystique are captured here, as well as the psychological forces that mold social mores as manifested in fashion trends.

Moreover, the copy is an example of the persuasive power of marketing to shape tastes, mold behavior, and instigate trends.

Viva la difference!

As many observers are realizing and reporting, the dramatic changes being dictated by Facebook’s Timeline are disenfranchising small businesses.

As Jay Baer writes in “14 Ways New Facebook Betrays Small Business,” the changes being ushered in by Facebook’s Timeline will make it difficult for small businesses to build and maintain a Facebook presence.

Given 30 days to revamp their Facebook pages and maintain them going forward, small businesses must scurry to make significant changes they are ill-equipped to handle—particularly those lacking the budgets, creative talent, and dedicated marketing resources of larger companies.

Facebook’s changes generally favor big businesses over small, and a good number of the new features require a staff devoted to the care and feeding of Facebook, a capability beyond the means of many small businesses.

For example, about the new Auto-Play Content feature, Baer notes that it is a “newfound playground for big brands, but probably not something most small businesses will have the dollars or desire to embrace.”

Similarly, about the new Real-Time Insights feature, Baer writes, “This is a nifty opportunity to be sure, but of course will be beyond the reach of small business due to budget and lack of staff to sit around and stare at real-time data streams.”

Even more egregious in Baer’s eyes is the Reach Generator, about which he writes, “This is the end of Facebook as a ‘free’ option for brands, and demonstrates such gall and guile it makes me want to scream at my laptop.”

Among those who share Baer’s view is Mari Cochran, a Facebook business consultant, who in "Facebook and My Gut: Thumbs Down for Small Business," lays out his perceptions of how Facebook’s changes are “not good for small business”  but “very good for large ones.”

Says Cochran:

“Small business owners cannot afford to spend this kind of time setting up and managing a page. They also cannot necessarily spend the money to hire someone to do it for them unless there is real return on the investment of time and resources. It seems that Facebook has gotten so large they no longer care about the small business owner.” 

Michael Katz, managng editor of Commerce on Facebook, sees the new Facebook changes as particularly harmful to small retailers. Katz writes that, “Small to medium sized retailers, who already had little luck selling in Facebook with little, if any, marketing budgets, will be hit the hardest by this move.” 

Katz also sees the changes favoring the big enterprise at the expense of the little guy, noting that “it will be the enterprise solutions of retail applications who will benefit the most from this change.” 

Among the most significant and harmful changes for small businesses, critics say, is the elimination of the default landing page. 

As Victoria Ransom explains on Mashable.com, “The option was one of the primary ways to control the first (branded) impression a user encountered” and its elimination “will drastically change user impressions when they first visit a brand’s Timeline Page.”

Cochran calls the elimination of the default landing page the most important new change and notes that it “does away with a lot of products and a lot of time business owners have spent creating those things.”

Baer and Cochran both scoff at the 30-day notice Facebook gave businesses to implement the new changes. Says Baer:

“Thirty days to find a Cover image; replace the landing tab; change about copy; decide what and when to pin and star; figure out how to handle direct messages; reconfigure legacy apps and pick which two will be shown as a default; and potentially add milestones, is actually a frighteningly short period of time for small business – who do not sit around and ponder their Facebook best practices every day.”

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

Two of the top online data backup services that have been slugging it out in the marketplace for the past few years are Box (formerly Box.net) and Dropbox.

Box, although it offers a free plan, has carved out a niche among higher-end enterprises, while Dropbox’s ease and simplicity, with more limited workgroup and feature sophistication, has appealed mainly to personal and small business users.   

If you look at comparative reviews from a year ago or less, you’ll see that Box consistently won on corporate workgroup features, while Dropbox won on simplicity and price.

Each of these vendors has revised its offerings to address the shortcomings that have won points and accolades for the other.

Box, after taking it on the chin for pricing vs. Dropbox, has thrown a roundhouse punch, and now offers considerably more for less. Box’s latest pricing provides 10 times more storage than Dropbox at $5 less per month.

Box’s Business plan is $15 per month with a maximum of 1,000 GB (1 TB) for three to 500 users.

By comparison, Dropbox’s Pro 50 plan provides 50 GB of storage for $9.99 per month, while its Pro 100 plan provides 100 GB for $19.99 per month.

Pushing the envelope further, Box’s Enterprise plan offers businesses unlimited capacity and unlimited users, but it does not provide any published pricing for the plan, rather you must consult with a sales rep to obtain a quote.

Dropbox on its end, after years of being dinged vs. Box.net for lacking team collaboration capabilities, has introduced a workgroup collaboration offering called Teams, priced at $795 for five users, with 1 TB of storage and extra users costing $125 each.

Box, meanwhile, continues to expand and refine its workgroup capabilities, announcing a new feature called Box Sync, which enables PCs and Macs to share common files and workspaces, and supporting up to 10,000 employees.

SaaS groupware solutions like these enable workgroups to set up shared spaces in the cloud with restricted access and granular permissions. Cloud-based groupware offers an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint by eliminating the need to install servers in-house and pay Windows application licensing fees.

Box’s radical pricing adjustments, meanwhile, address one of the general shortcomings of the paid online backup in the small biz arena. While the free backup services have been a great deal, the price/performance value of the paid services has not been that compelling.

As Krishan Subramanian noted, for the cost of 250 GB of online storage at $250 per year, a personal user or small business could buy five or six 500 GB hard disks and use remote login for access, mobility, and backup. “Clearly, cloud was not offering the kind of cost savings that will encourage such users to jump in,” said Subramanian.

While Box’s pricing can now compete with external hard drive solutions, Dropox’s 100-GB limit continues to be a sore point among users with larger storage needs. Many businesses, for example, have collections of videos, presentations, and images that require backup and that easily exceed the 100-GB limit.  

Bottom Line: For personal users and small businesses with more limited needs, Dropbox has an edge in simplicity and ease of use. For corporations and business workgroups that require larger amounts of storage and more sophisticated features, Box has an edge. In the small business pricing war, Box is the new champion, giving you much more bang for the buck. 

With online marketing assuming increasingly greater importance, the benefits that marketing automation systems can deliver are more valuable than ever—including identifying and attracting the best prospects, converting the prospects to customers, and generating greater revenues through up-selling, cross-selling, and increasing customer loyalty, while lowering costs.

To help you understand and select the program that best meets your needs, the Comparz team has assembled and written an excellent series of detailed reviews on the top-ranked marketing automation solutions.

The leading marketing automation programs reviewed are Eloqua, InfusionSoft, LoopFuse, Marketo Spark, and Pardot. 

These systems give you a framework, workflow, and tools for web and e-mail marketing, lead tracking and nurturing, and optimizing the conversion of leads to customers. The systems are increasingly adding socia media features and being more deeply integrated with social media services. 

Read the reviews to gain insight into the apps, and feel free to add your comments and opinions to share with the community.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of Marketing Automation software for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' Marketing Automation software reviews and rankings.

Deceptive legal tactics. Doctored testimony. Suppressed evidence. These are the charges, apparently valid, brought by Leader Technologies against Facebook in a legal case set to resume in four days.

If you haven’t heard of the Leader Technologies vs. Facebook case, you can be forgiven. Reporting on the case has been muffled, suppressed, and banished.

As Donna Kline writes: “Someone answer a question for me: Why hasn’t the mainstream media picked up on the Leader v. Facebook patent infringement case?”

The central issue in the case is whether Facebook’s platform is based on technology “borrowed” illegally from Leader Technologies. In July 2010, a jury found Facebook guilty of “literally infringing” on all 11 of the 11 Leader Technologies patents of which it was accused of violating. 

Facebook’s lawyers were able to win a split decision to invalidate the patent on a technicality, called on-sale bar, using what Leader Technologies says was a bogus argument engineered by Facebook’s lawyers using deceptive legal tactics.

The basis for the on-sale argument is that the patented technology was available for sale before it was patented. However, the law requires Facebook to present clear evidence that this occurred.  Although Leader Technologies provided the source code for the products in question, the code was never introduced or mentioned by Facebook’s lawyers.

Instead of showing any real proof, explained Mike McKibben, Chairman and Founder of Leader Technologies in an interview, Facebook’s lawyers took a black marker and blacked out large portions, about 60%, of his 2009 testimony in what is called Interrogatory No. 9, and presented the 2009 testimony as pertaining to 2002 products.

Said McKibben, “That’s public information. That’s a piece of evidence for anyone to see. There were whole sections of the answer just blocked out.”

Interrogatory No. 9, explained  McKibben, “was a question about our products in 2009, not about our products in 2002. The jury became confused because Facebook alleged that it was an allegation about a product for all time. And we never said it did, there was no proof of that.”

These tactics, characterized as legal “black arts,” are reminiscent of the doctored videos introduced by Microsoft in its antitrust trial. The tactics employed by Facebook’s lawyers are explored in detail on a site called The Origin of Facebook's Technology?

Facebook's claims are baseless and can't be proven, according to McKibben. "We just weren’t selling the invention because it wasn’t ready yet," he said. "That’s what I kept saying at trial, and that’s what my co-inventor said at trial, and they didn’t produce a shred of evidence to prove that wasn’t true.”

If Leader Technologies' claims are true, it means that Mark Zuckerberg stole the technology that was at the heart of Facebook’s inception.

And that is what McKibben is claiming. “Our story is about the underlying framework of Facebook," he said. "Ours was the engine underneath it."

During the trial, it became clear that it was virtually impossible for Zuckerberg to have created Facebook’s technology platform in the timeframe he had to do so.

As Kline reports:

“Are people having a hard time believing that Zuckerberg actually copied a patent to create the FB platform? Are they more inclined to believe that he wrote the code for FB in ‘one to two weeks?’ When the platform in question took Leader Technologies 145,000 man hours and $10 million to create? Seriously?”

Similarly, the Origin of Facebook Technology? site asks, “How can a complete platform be conceived, researched, designed, written, edited, debugged and staged in under two weeks, by one person, while taking a full class load and studying for finals?”

Indeed, the original jury found that Facebook’s technology was lifted from Leader Technologies. And the U.S. patent Office has reaffirmed Leader Technologies' patents.

Said McKibben, “We do not believe that Facebook’s on-sale bar win is valid. They had no evidence, we believe the law is on our side, the facts are on our side, and we are going to prevail. As soon as we have that, we are going to go back to trial and go for damages, willful infringement, and an injunction to get Facebook to stop using our technology.”

Another good question posed by Kline is why was this case, which poses a significant risk to investors, is not mentioned in Facebook’s IPO filing?

This is a high-stakes dispute with big-time ramifications. As PRWeb notes, “If Leader Technologies prevails at appeal, Facebook could be subject to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.”

And yet we have heard nary a peep about the case in the media? Why?

We’re approaching the first anniversary of Google’s launch of Panda, an event that has had a profound impact on the practice of SEO (search engine optimization), causing a good number of observers to pronounce SEO dead.  

I joined Klout just before the famous, or infamous, algorithm change last October. When Klout’s scoring method changed, I was among the members whose score diminished by half overnight.

Many members were bitter and complained bitterly.

I was not that invested in Klout, and although I didn’t think Klout’s ratings were accurate before or after the change, I continued to monitor my account, mostly out of curiosity and as an experiment.  

Over the past few months, as I’ve watched my Klout scores fluctuate for no apparent rhyme or reason, I’ve lost all confidence in Klout as an accurate barometer, or even a legitimate service.  

Particularly dubious were the Klout findings for the topics it determined I was “influential about.” In a space of days, Klout determined I was influential about 6 topics, then 5 topics, then 7 topics, then 6 topics, then 5 topics. True authority and influence on a topic does not wax and wane so quickly.

My general Klout score was no more reliable, rising suddenly by eight points, then just as suddenly decreasing by a point, then sinking by three more points. The oscillations seemed to occur for no apparent reason, and to run counter to Klout’s scoring methodology.

Klout says it measures True Reach: How many people you influence; Amplification: How much you influence them; and Network Impact: The influence of your network.

Klout bases its assessments on your social media activity, but mainly on your posts and mentions on Twitter and/or Facebook.

As a determiner of a person’s clout, this methodology is superficial and neglects factors that would yield a more accurate measurement—such as a member’s actual work and impact, actual standing in a community, and other important venues in which a person’s work is performed or measured.

It seems that the accomplishments of a musician who has records on the Billboard Hot 100, wins Grammy awards, has myriad fans, and is highly influential in the music industry might not register on Klout’s recognition system.

The findings Klout was serving up for me were not accurate even by its own published methodology. My scores were falling at a time when my tweets, retweets, and Twitter follower count were rising dramatically, and when many more influential members were following me.

Moreover, the number of my articles that were being syndicated, cited, and republished online was high and growing, and these factors Klout failed even to consider.

Yet Klout calls itself “The Standard for Influence.”

As an amusement Klout might be OK, but it wants to be taken seriously, and that it does not deserve.   

The cloud is proving a blessing to many developers, enabling them to quickly deploy, test, and scale applications without having to worry about building and managing complex server infrastructures.

Two of the top-ranked cloud platform providers are Linode and Heroku. They each rent remote servers, carved into virtual machines, on which developers can run their web applications.

Linode and Heroku have built loyal followings by providing solid and dependable service, great tools, and outstanding support.  The key difference between Linode and Heroku is the amount of system administration and resources provided—including memory, computing power, disk storage, and connections—which is reflected in the pricing.

Heroku is higher end, offering a richer set of resources, higher scalability, and full system administration services, while Linode is more bare bones, offering a sparer set of resources and leaving system administration to the customer.  

Linode, as the name suggests, provides Linux nodes, and offers a toolset to ease the provisioning and management of Linux nodes. Developers tend to use Linode for PHP and Ruby on Rails applications. Heroku specializes in Ruby on Rails applications, but has added support for Java, Python, and other languages.

A big benefit that Heroku and Linode offer developers is taking much of the labor and pain out of hosting a Ruby on Rails application. In the past, as IBM developer Antonio Cangiano notes, “Keeping a Rails site up and running required considerable hosting know-how and effort.”

Because of services like Heroku and Linode, says Cangiano, “These days, you no longer need to make a major investment when it comes to your time, money and resources in order to host a simple Rails site.”

Besides system administration support, the main difference between Linode and Heroku is the power and scale they provide. You can see these differences reflected in their pricing. Heroku offers six plans priced from $200 to $6,400 per month. Linode offers six plans priced from $19.95 to $159.95 per month, plus four higher-end plans from $319.95 to $799.95 per month.

As one user said: “I am a customer of both Linode and Heroku, and use them for different things. My Linode is my sandbox, with a handful of PHP projects (very small) running. It's mostly for development, and control over everything lets me tinker. When it comes to deploying an app, however, I always go to Heroku.”

Heroku and Linode each provide a free plan as well. For tinkering and small-scale projects, these free services are a great deal. As one developer said, “Heroku’s free package can get you a long way.”

Bottom Line: If you are a price-sensitive DIY type with smaller-scale projects, Linode is for you. If you want high-end service or need to deploy a production app that requires more power, scalability, and full sys admin support, then Heroku is the way to go.

If you haven’t noticed, Pinterest is the latest sensation in social media. The site just crossed the 11 million total visits per week mark, and is the fastest site in history to break the 10 million unique visitor mark, according to comScore.

Not bad for a site that launched two years ago.

Pinterest, which calls itself “an online pinboard” and “social catalog,” allows you to pin a collection of images to a board, for private use or to publicize your interest in a subject and attract others’ interest.

Pinterest is slanted towards the female gender, particularly moms and home makers—with ladies’ fashion, recipes, beauty care, jewelry, crafts, children’s wares, and home decoration prominent throughout.

About 68% of Pinterest's users are women, and the site’s key demographic are higher-income women in the 18-34-year-old range, many of whom are in the U.S. heartland, according to comScore.  

A walk-through shows photos of everything from a mudroom to a lemon layer cake. Members also post pictures of oddities and nature scenes—from cars of the future to ice-encrusted lighthouses to an elegant theater turned parking lot. Also popular are cutesy pet and baby pictures.

Scrolling examples suggest you use the site to save your recipes or plan your wedding. Even the Technology section has a Ladies Home Journal look and feel, with photos of runway fashion models embedded in the mix.

The site is visually appealing, nicely designed, and softly lit. The images have an artful, tasteful, precious quality. The content, while stylish, is inoffensive and safe, and has the look of being carefully curated to maintain its ambiance and cull out vulgarity.

Pinterest’s etiquette guide encourages you to be nice, be creative, give credit, and warns, with a smiley face, that nudity is forbidden.

Like Twitter, you find and follow other members, and Pinterest’s profiles tell you how many people you follow and how many are following you. Like Facebook, members leave scrolling comments on other members’ pinboards.

The formula is working. Pinterest traffic has grown exponentially, and doubled from 4.9 million visitors in November 2011 to 11.7 million in January 2011. Pinterest also has entered the top-10 social media pantheon along with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., and is talked about on marketing sites like B2C, where articles advising you how to exploit Pinterest reside alongside articles telling you how to exploit Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

While Pinterest is very much a site for soccer moms, businesses are jumping onboard to reach this audience, and the service lends itself to being a virtual showroom and marketing brochure.

Like other social venues, businesses are urged to use subtly and tact in marketing. As Mashable’s Rob Lammle warns, “It’s frowned upon to spam your Boards with nothing but your own products or projects. That doesn’t mean it’s outright banned, but you need to contribute more to the community if you want to stay in its good graces.”

So check out Pinterest, see what the fuss is all about, and consider what potential uses the site might offer you.

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

Remote login applications typically are used by tech support workers to take control of a remote computer to manage and troubleshoot the machine. They also can be used for logging into your home or office system while traveling, and for videoconferencing, sharing documents, and collaborating.

TeamViewer and LogMeIn Pro are two of the top-rated remote login solutions. Each provides a console that allows you to control a remote computer as though it was your own, and their overall feature sets for managing computers remotely are similarly comprehensive.

TeamViewer and LogMeIn each have a large and devoted following among tech support professionals, and there are online forums in which advocates argue passionately about the superiority of their preferred solution.

TeamViewer receives universally high praise for its unparalleled ease of setup and use, as well as its ability to install its login client remotely over the Internet without having to be physically present at the remote machine.

LogMeIn supporters praise its technical capabilities, performance, and ability to access a client without a person being physically present at the other end. LogMeIn also has the ability to install without being physically present at a computer.

Pricewise, although TeamViewer and LogMeIn are among the best remote login solutions, you have to pay a premium to license them. Comparatively pricing these solutions gets tricky because the licensing schemes and numbers of concurrent users and managed clients supported differ, as do features and capabilities that are priced as add-ons.

TeamViewer sells lifetime licenses for its Business, Premium, and Corporate plans for $749, $1.499, and $3,107, respectively. However, the number of remote sessions in its Premium plan is limited to one and in its Corporate plan to three, and additional sessions are $849 each. 

LogMeIn Pro is priced at $12.20 per computer per month, or $69 per computer per year, with discounts for 5, 10, and 25 computers. For above 25 computers, you must contact sales for a quote. LogMeIn Central, a web-based management console, is $299 per year or $49 per month.

Some users feel the cost over the lifetime of using TeamViewer and LogMeIn is fair, while others find their pricing too expensive. 

For TeamViewer, there are a number of complaints and warnings online from users who claim the company used misleadding practices, including disabling their clients, to force them to pay for upgrades to new versions soon after they had licensed a version.

For example, Mike from Xzyla Corp. complains: 

“Be careful with Team Viewer licensing…The problem is team Viewer asks you to upgrade, so myself and clients have upgraded only to find out our licenses didn’t work anymore. To upgrade we have to pay an upgrade cost on each license including the ones we purchased 2 months ago.”

Yet another user complains:

“You will buy a license, then they will update the ''version' and of course new versions are not compatible with old one(s) and you have to buy new licenses. Be careful with this company.”

Bottom Line: TeamViewer and LogMeIn Pro both have strong reputations for their ease of use and technical capabilities. Each offers a free version you can try. Choose the solution that best meets your needs and preferences, and be prepared to pay a premium for a business solution. 

Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of software services and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.

The actual numbers of active users of social media sites are important to businesses that are considering advertising on those sites. You want to reach an audience of real prospects who are receptive to your products.

However, while the overall number of people who establish an account on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ may be high, many of those members rarely or never use the services, and many accounts are duplicates or fakes.

In “The Hollow Emptiness in Social Media Numbers—Most Accounts Are Fake or Empty,” Tom Foremski estimates that the number of active users could be as small as one-third, and that about one-half of user accounts could be phony or blank.

As Foremski writes, “With the possibility that nearly 50% of social network users could be fake or empty user accounts — this is a massive issue for social media marketing.”

The upshot of this for businesses is that their advertising will reach a smaller audience of potential customers. “In social media,” says Foremski, “50% of your marketing could be wasted trying to reach fake or empty profile users.”

Inactive users, empty accounts, and phony users are called ciphers, ghosts, and shadow members.

Exactly how many members are inactive is unknown, but the numbers are large, according to studies. For Twitter, for example, an RJ Metrics study found that only about 17% of Twitter users were active. The number of Google+ active users has been similarly pegged at from 17% to 30%.

Kevin Kelly in "The Ciphers of Social Media" writes that, “Most of the half million people following me on Google+ are ciphers. They have signed up, but have not made a single public post, or posted their own image or a profile, or made a comment. They aren't home.”

Kelly cites a study by two Popular Mechanics writers who hand-checked 1,000 of their Twitter followers and found that only 25% were real and that 49% were fake or spam.

Similar doubt has been cast on Facebook’s active user numbers. In its IPO filing, Facebook touts its overall membership as 845 million “monthly active users” and 483 million “daily active users.”

However, writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times, “If it is hard to believe that so many people are clicking on facebook.com every day, that’s because well, they aren’t, exactly. Those eye-popping numbers should have an asterisk next to them.”

Sorkin cites Barry Ritholz, who points out that in Facebook’s IPO filing it labels users as active when they merely click on a “Like” icon from an external site and never actually visit Facebook.

As Ritholtz notes in assessing the impact of these tangential users on Facebook’s monetization capability, “If they click a ‘like’ button but do not go to Facebook that day, they cannot be marketed to, they do not see any advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services.”

This, says Ritholz, “helps to explain why Facebook’s annual revenue per user is so low.”

In “Why Facebook’s Numbers Are Inflated,” Kenneth Lim says the large numbers of users touted by Facebook “are absolutely not unique” and points to the widespread practice of social gaming on Facebook as causing users to create large numbers of duplicate accounts.

Lim cites All Facebook statistics that show that 53% of Facebook users play games and that 50% of Facebook log-ins are specifically to play games.

Ultimately, says Lim, “the low barrier for playing social games renders a portion of the player base unmarketable.”

Subtract the fake accounts, phony likes, inactive users, duplicate accounts, and unmarketable teens, and you have seriously decreased the potential advertising population on Facebook.

This may be why Facebook is so aggressively foisting advertising on its members in the form of Sponsored Stories and scrolling Timelines. It also may explain why Facebook is so actively selling user data to third parties to boost its revenues.

As Tom Foremski writes, “Clearly, there is a lot more research to be done but equally clear is the fact that you can’t trust —by a truly massive margin — the numbers for things such as “likes” of a corporate Facebook page; followers of a corporate Twitter account; numbers of views of a “viral” video, etc.”

Similarly, as Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, “If large numbers of accounts are fake, and equally large numbers have no profile information, it means that there is a far less commercial value in social media networks than total numbers would suggest.”

If you want to stay ahead of the SEO (search engine optimization) curve and have your content show up high in the search engine rankings, you should be learning how to embed rich snippets in your web pages.