DEMOfall '09 product spotlight: Digsby

Let's be honest – keeping track of your favorite Web sites has become a real pain. Fear not, though, because a little cartoon blob named Digsby is here to help. Slideshow: 13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 Between Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Gmail and a whole slew of instant messaging protocols, the Internet has become a fragmented mess where you must constantly check for updates and shuttle between tabs and windows. Digsby, which is the brainchild of the Rochester, N.Y., company dotSyntax, is essentially a mass aggregator of social networking, e-mail and instant messaging sites.

At DEMO this week, Digsby announced that it has added Twitter to its already considerable arsenal of integrated social networking sites. But Digsby goes one step further than most aggregation applications because it actively notifies you every time there is an update to one of your e-mail or social networking accounts. However, Digsby didn't just incorporate Twitter into its platform but also made some significant changes to the Twitter format in the hopes of making it more accessible to users. If you can, try to sum up Digsby in 100 words or less. After the DEMO presentation, dotSyntax CEO and founder Steve Shapiro sat down with Network World to discuss how Digsby can make Internet use more efficient and what its designers plan on tackling next. Digsby helps you manage your instant message, e-mail and social networking accounts from one easy-to-use desktop application.

The key is that it serves more as a notifying application than an aggregator, as it gives you a real-time snapshot of e-mails, tweets, status updates and so forth. It helps you save time because you don't have to keep checking for updates. How is Digsby able to integrate all of these IM and social networking sites into one platform? The social networks have published APIs, which is phenomenal from our perspective. It's a lot of work. For instant messaging, there are multi-protocol IM clients that have been around for a while, so that also helps.

When Digsby set out to improve Twitter, what did it identify as the platform's chief strengths and flaws? We haven't tackled Skype yet; that's supposed to be the toughest one to integrate into an application like Digsby. The great thing about Twitter is that it's like a giant chat room where you can choose who you want to listen to in that room. Instead you interact with the whole online community whether they're your personal friends or not. It's not like Facebook where it's a closed social network. From a weakness standpoint, a lot of people that join Twitter don't get it because it's not like a lot of social networking sites they've used before.

To address the issue of people not understanding how Twitter works, we've reframed it more as a chat technology that people have been using for a decade. And the other problem is that once you follow more than 50 or so people, that noise just becomes tremendous and hard to keep track of. So when you use Twitter on Digsby, the most recent tweets appear at the bottom with previous tweets at the top of the screen. The other thing we did was to give you the ability to make subgroups of people on Twitter that you want to listen to a little bit less than your core group of friends. We thought that making this more like a traditional chat system would make it more accessible for average users. On the Twitter Web site you have main timeline, and with everybody you're following, it starts to get pretty cluttered.

So for instance, you can create a group called 'news' where you can place the tweets of journalists you have to be following. So to fix this we let you make different groups. Then those people you've added to this list no longer show up on your main page where you would keep your friends or people whose tweets you really want to read. The next big thing we're doing is adding supports for group chat protocols and also releasing a version of Digsby that works for Mac and Linux computers, since right now Digsby is only available for Windows. Finally, does Digsby plan on integrating any other IM protocols or social networking sites in the near future?

D.C. appoints CTO to take over scandal tainted agency

The District of Columbia this week hired a specialized search engine developer and entrepreneur as its new chief technology officer, overseeing what is arguably one of the most visible, progressive - and troubled - municipal technology operations in the U.S. New CTO Bryan Sivak is the founder of InQuira Inc. a privately held San Bruno, Calif.-based knowledge management firm, and has long worked on developing search engine technology designed for customer service environments. The new CTO joins a technology operation has faced some difficulties this year. Sivak succeeds Vivek Kundra, who left earlier this year after his appointment by President Barack Obama to become the nation's first CIO. That position had been filled on an interim basis since Kundra's departure. A week after Kundra was appointed to the White House post, federal law enforcement officials filed bribery charges against Yusuf Acar, the department's acting chief security officer, in connection with what prosecutors alleged were a number of schemes developed to defraud the District of thousands of dollars.

Payments were allegedly made to those "workers." After the arrests, Kundra took a leave from his new federal post. The scheme involved adding non-existent employees, or "ghost workers"," to the city payroll. Once the Obama administration determined that Kundra was not connected to the bribery scheme, he returned to the post. He is also a strong proponent of cloud computing. Kundra gained notoriety and the attention of the Obama administration for his efforts to increase accessibility to government data. Mitchell Kramer, an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group in Boston, said InQuira began operating as a developer of natural language search technology.

This technology differs from more general Google-type search products by indexing only relevant information that can best answer specific customer queries. Later it combined that technology with a knowledge management and search application to create customer service tools that help customers seek product information and help on a company's Web site. Kramer said the market served by InQuira is growing, and is focused on high-end customers. Kramer said it's unclear why someone with Sivak's background was selected for the District CTO's job. "For the last seven years he has worked for small software vendor that has a very narrow and not widely adopted application," he said. Salesforce.com is emerging as a competitor in that business. Kramer said Sivak could help the District use IT to provide better services to residents.

Sivak was not immediately available for comment. But he wondered how Sivak will handle more general IT issues, such as changes to the government's general ledger systems, at least in the short term. "I'm sure he is capable of learning that stuff, but it's not clear that he has had the experience in acquiring, building and supporting those applications," Kramer said. In a prepared statement announcing the appointment, Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty said that Sivak "brings a wealth of software and Internet technology experience to District government, and we look forward to putting his talents to good use for our residents." Prior to founding InQuira, Sivak co-founded Electric Knowledge LLC in 2000 along with Edwin Cooper. Sivak had earlier worked as a software engineer at IBM. In 2002 the company merged with answerFriend and the combined company became the basis of InQuira.

Rivals mock Microsoft's free security software

Although one of the top consumer security vendors welcomed Microsoft's Security Essentials to the market, another dismissed the new free software as a "poor product" that will "never be up to snuff." Earlier today, Microsoft launched Security Essentials , its free antivirus and antispyware software suite, which has been in development for almost a year. "I think it's a good thing that they're in the market," said Carol Carpenter, the general manager of Trend Micro's consumer division. "We look forward to the competition ... and I think Microsoft's targeting of developing countries and the unprotected is a good approach." Microsoft has pitched Security Essentials, which replaced the now-defunct for-a-fee Windows OneCare, as basic software suitable for users who can't, or won't, pay for security software. And now they've decided to go for the free market, but that's a very crowded market. Not everyone, however, agreed with Carpenter. "Security Essentials won't change anything," said Jens Meggers, Symantec's vice president of engineering. "Microsoft has a really bad track record in security," he added, ticking off several ventures into consumer security that the giant has tried, including Windows Defender, an anti-spyware tool bundled with Windows Vista and Windows 7; the released-monthly Malicious Software Removal Tool; and OneCare. "Like OneCare, Security Essentials is a poor product," said Meggers. "It has very average detection rates.

There's not much room to grow there." In a company blog, another Symantec employee called Security Essentials a "rerun" of OneCare , and said: "At the end of the day, Microsoft Security Essentials is a rerun no one should watch." It's no surprise that top-tier security vendors like Trend Micro and Symantec dismissed Security Essentials today. At the time, a Symantec executive said it was a capitulation by Microsoft, which was tacitly admitting it couldn't compete . But Meggers' take today was even more bearish. "We don't like the notion of 'basic,'" he said. "That makes me very worried, because the risk on the Web today is far too high for 'basic.' Tossing a bunch of little basic tools into the computing environment doesn't make it safe." Even Carpenter had some unkind words for Microsoft. "It's better to use something than to use nothing, but you get what you pay for," she said. "But I don't think it will worry the main security vendors. They did the same thing last year, when Microsoft announced the upcoming demise of OneCare and said it would ship a free, streamlined product. If I were a free, focused security company, trying to get my upsell over time, like AVG [Technologies], then I'd be concerned." Symantec's Meggers also wondered what took Microsoft so long to come up with Security Essentials. "It takes them an entire year to remove features from OneCare, to make something even worse than OneCare?" Meggers asked. "I could have done that with three developers in three months." And that's a good clue that Microsoft won't be able to keep up with the likes of Symantec, Trend Micro and McAfee, Meggers added. "Look how long it took them to build it. When was the last time that Microsoft innovated?" The free Security Essentials can be downloaded for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 from the Microsoft Web site. Security needs constant innovation.

Apple adds Apps for Everything collections

Looks like Apple's taking some of the criticisms of its App Store to heart. Broken down into a handful of different categories like Apps for Cooks and Apps for Music, the collections consist of apps related to a specific topic. On Tuesday, the company unveiled a new section of its Web site, Apps for Everything.

There are currently 12 different collections, each featuring between eight and 24 applications along with tips for using the built-in features of your iPhone. The section also features lists of the top ten paid and free lists for the Travel category in the App Store. You might be traveling, for example, in which case Apple recommends apps like Frommer's travel guides or Currency for dealing with conversion rates and suggests tips such as using the Maps app to bookmark locations and remembering to turn off data roaming to save money. With more than 85,000 applications in the App Store, one common complaint is that it's gotten harder and harder to find quality apps. We don't yet know whether Apple will be adding more categories to its Web site in the future, or changing the composition of its existing collections. Apple's Staff Picks section (also available via the iPhone section of its Web site) is well known to draw attention to particular applications and these new Apps for Everything collections seems to be an extension of that.

Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that Apple's new venture resembles-uncannily, some might say-our own App Guide essentials collections to which we regularly add new content assembled by the Macworld editorial staff. But at least we can all agree that it needs to be easier for consumers to find the best apps. [via The Loop]

Wall Street Beat: Red Hat, 3Com, PC sector boosts tech

Macroeconomic concerns put pressure on stocks in all sectors this week, but acquisitions and financial news continued to stoke investor hopes for an imminent recovery from the recession for IT. Though not all the news was positive, revenue numbers from Red Hat, 3Com and Palm, Dell's acquisition of services company Perot, and continued improvement in hardware sector surveys fed confidence in the tech sector. A drop in oil prices also raised concerns about economic activity and demand for energy. Stocks in major indices fell Thursday as market watchers absorbed news from the National Association of Realtors, which said home sales fell 2.7 percent in August compared with a rise of 7.2 percent in July. Meanwhile tech vendors, while feeling the effects of the recession, have been doing better than expected.

Excluding one-time items, earnings were $0.08 per share. Networking vendor 3Com Thursday morning reported that net income for the quarter ending Aug. 28 fell to US$7.5 million, or $0.02 per share, from $79.8 million a year earlier. Revenue declined 15 percent to $290.5 million. Excluding exceptional items, 3Com actually beat analyst expectations of $0.05-per-share earnings on revenue of $278.2 million, according to a Thomson Reuters poll. Though the numbers sound bad, $70 million in earnings from the prior year period came from a one-time occurrence: resolution of a patent dispute. For the current quarter, 3Com forecasts also trump analyst expectations.

Analysts were forecasting $0.06 a share on revenue of $286.9 million. 3Com was trading at $5.05, $0.26 up from the day earlier, after the announcement. The company expects earnings of $0.06 to $0.07 a share on revenue of $295 million to $305 million. On its part, Research In Motion had mixed financial news late Thursday. Excluding the charge, however, RIM would have earned $588.4 million, or $1.03 per share, on revenue of $3.53 billion, up 37 percent from a year earlier. The company reported that earnings declined by 4 percent for its second fiscal quarter as a legal charge offset sales of BlackBerry devices. Analysts had forecast earnings of $1.00 per share on revenue of $3.62 billion.

Acquisitions point to where the action is in tech, as companies jostle to ramp up on hot areas of tech. The real tech-stock success this week was Linux software and services vendor Red Hat, which Wednesday said that for the quarter ending Aug. 30, revenue was $183.6 million, an increase of 12 percent from the year-earlier period. "IT organizations continue to move ahead with purchases of high value solutions, and Red Hat is capitalizing on this demand as a result of our strong customer relationships and proven value proposition," said CEO Jim Whitehurst in the company's earnings statement. "We continue to be optimistic about Red Hat's future and believe the company is well positioned when the economic and IT spending environment improves," Bank of America-Merrill Lynch upgraded its recommendation on the company's stock and Bank of America raised its rating for the company to buy, noting the strong sales during a decline in corporate spending on IT. Red Hat shares were trading at $27.96 Thursday afternoon, up $3.08. M&A activity has also stirred excitement in tech lately. Dell Monday announced it would pay $3.9 billion to acquire IT services provider Perot Systems. HP last year bought service company EDS, and IBM has long been able to offer services to support a wide product portfolio. The move was widely seen as a way for Dell, the number-two PC company behind Hewlett-Packard, to match HP's and IBM's services offerings.

The move takes place as analysts revise estimates for PC sales upward. Its latest PC report said that current data show worldwide shipments could hit 285 million units in 2009, a 2 percent decline from 2008 shipments of 291 million, but well above its June forecast, which forecast a 6 percent unit decline in 2009. "PC demand appears to be running much stronger than we expected back in June, especially in the U.S. and China," said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. "We think shipments are likely to be growing again in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared to the fourth quarter of 2008." Gartner said Wednesday that the worst may be over for the PC sector.