5 Things Motorola's New CEO Must Do

Google today said that it has finally closed its acquisition of Motorola. First announced in August 2011, the $12.5 billion deal took longer than expected to clear regulatory hurdles in China. China gave Google the green light on May 19 and Google now owns Motorola Mobility, for which it paid $40 per share in cash.

Now that the deal is complete, Google has already made changes to the company's leadership. Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha, who led the company for about three and a half years, is stepping aside and being replaced by Dennis Woodside, a Google veteran. According to Google, Woodside played a pivotal role in the acquisition process. Jha will work with Google to help complete the leadership transition, but only temporarily.

"I'm happy to announce the deal has closed," said Google CEO Larry Page. "Motorola is a great American tech company, with a track record of over 80 years of innovation. It's a great time to be in the mobile business, and I'm confident that the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come."
[ Read about Google's plan to sell "pure Android" smartphones through its Google Play Store. See Why Google's Nexus Plan Makes Sense. ]
One concession Google had to make in order to garner approval from Chinese antitrust regulators was a commitment to Android's openness. Google agreed to keep the platform open to other handset makers for a period of at least five years from the closing of the acquisition. Google explained in its press release that Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Motorola Mobility will be operated as a separate business.
Google and Motorola need to get to work. Motorola Mobility's new CEO Dennis Woodside has already made some changes. He's bringing in a refreshed executive team and mixing them up with a number of existing execs from the Motorola side of the business. Aside from forming a new management team, here are five other things Woodside needs to do.
Focus on Fewer, Better Phones. Motorola has followed the industry trend of launching more than a dozen handsets each year, ranging from entry-level devices to high-end smartphones. The company needs to pull back and bring superior products to market rather than employ the shotgun approach.
Differentiate Hardware. Creating unique handsets is becoming more and more difficult, but differentiation is key to selling in the crowded smartphone market. Motorola can't be afraid to take risks on new technology to achieve this goal.
Foster and Improve Existing Business Partners. Motorola has relationships with carriers worldwide--relationships that were in place long before Google came along. Google and Motorola need to tread lightly and make sure these relationships can move forward productively. If wireless network operators, for example, start to think that Google is going to be another Apple and exert too much control over Android devices, they might not be willing to sell Motorola's devices.
Make a Swift Decision About the Cable Box Business. Motorola Mobility's other business is to provide set-top boxes to cable television subscribers. This is a decent business, but it isn't why Google bought Motorola. Google picked Motorola due to its 17,000 mobile technology patents. The cable box business can be a boon for Google TV, which has failed to really catch on since its 2010 launch. Google and Motorola need to either plow forward with it in a unique and appealing way or divest it so the company can concentrate on its core businesses.
Be Careful With Those Patents (And Settle with Microsoft). The 17,000 patents provide Google, Motorola, and Android licensees some protection in the current smartphone patent war among the hardware vendors. Motorola and Google would do well to sidestep these battles. More importantly, Motorola recently lost a patent case with Microsoft. Microsoft won a ban on Motorola imports. If the ban goes into effect, Motorola won't be allowed to import its key smartphones and sell them in the U.S. Google and Motorola need to sit down with Microsoft and hammer out an agreement for the patents at hand and move past this distraction.
Woodside seems bullish on Motorola's chances moving forward. Let's hope he can do good things with Motorola and get the company back in the game.
"Motorola literally invented the entire mobile industry with the first-ever commercial cell phone in 1983," said Woodside. "Thirty years later, mobile devices are at the center of the computing revolution. Our aim is simple: to focus Motorola Mobility's remarkable talent on fewer, bigger bets, and create wonderful devices that are used by people around the world."

Mobile Social Cloud CRM for smaill business

allows any business to interact with customers on any major social network , via a mobile device. The company said in a statement that the service is "so simple that any company, even one without an IT staff, can get up and running over a weekend."

With nearly a quarter of all time spent online being spent on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, has become a leader in integrating social networks into its customer service offerings.

The company envisions a scenario such as a customer posting a critical comment on Facebook about its newly purchased widget. While a desktop-based customer service worker for the widget maker might be the first stop for responding to the comment, the actual resolution might be better handled by a technical service person, who could be out in the field.

With Desk.com, that ticket can then be picked up by the technical service employee, and resolved via a mobile device. The ticket can be reassigned, have its status or priority changed, or have its customer information  modified.

Hes said that, according to its data , nearly three-quarters of small businesses use mobile applications in their daily operations. With Desk.com, SMBs can use a help desk that integrates social networks, e-mail, phone and other Web components, making social networks into what the company described as "first-class citizens along with traditional support channels."

Hourly for 'Casual' Reps

He runs on any smartphone that supports HTML 5, such as Android -based devices and Apple's iPhone. Reporting includes information on how many cases customer service agents have opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned, or reopened, and a dozen pre-built reports offer such data as handling time, time to first response, and first contact resolution rate.

CRM has priced the offering to appeal to SMBs. The first seat is free, and then it's $49 per agent per month. There's also an hourly model for what the company calls "casual" customer support reps, at $1 per hour.
He is based on the technology that yours obtained when it purchased social customer service startup Assistly last fall. Assistly's product allowed companies to organize customer conversations on social networks into a to-do list, and provided tools for support staff to respond, see customer histories, automate procedures and produce analytical reports.

Social, Mobile, Simple

In our interview with Alex Bard, vice president and general manager, Bard explained this service Cloud, a key part of its "social enterprise " efforts, had previously been optimized for the mid-market and large enterprises, but his extending the cloud toward the lower end of the market.

Bard said that, in researching smaller companies' needs, Sales "kept hearing three things -- it has to be social at its core, it needs to be mobile, and it needs to be simple." He added that thousands of Assistly customers have been moved to sale, and the response has been "overwhelmingly positive."

Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp., said Desk.com represents "the ultimate in the consumerization of IT, and a recognition of how we're no longer tethered to an office with a traditional PC ."

She noted that Salesforce made "a pretty quick turnaround" in readying Assistly for the new product launch, adding that the model of customer support from virtually any mobile device "will absolutely become a standard."

Watch YouTube Videos Without Flash in HTML5

Running on Mac or Linux and tired of Adobe Flash eating up all your CPU cycles while you’re watching YouTube? Buggy plugins that crash your browser and freeze your PC? Proprietary formats that get in the way? Want to embrace HTML5 and the future? Well, now you can… one YouTube video at a time.

We’ve written an HTML 5 Video Viewer for YouTube, and you can use it to browse YouTube in true 21st Century HTML5 quality. And it’s super-simple to use.

Flash has been the bane of online websurfers ever since the 90s, especially on platforms where Adobe doesn’t bother to go the extra mile to ensure that their proprietary, binary implementations are stable and efficient. On Linux and Mac OS X, the flash implementation takes up over half the available CPU and at high-resolutions stuttering occurs. HTML5 poses the answer providing a way for browsers to use the native implementations to render videos directly in the browser without resorting to ActiveX and 3rd-party browser plugins… it just has yet to be embraced.

But now you can uninstall Flash and enjoy your online videos in peace. Just go to http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/ and enter the URL of a video to watch it in the embedded HTML5 viewer. Yes, you can skip, skim, pause, resume away to your heart’s content.

Even better, we’ve written a GreaseMonkey/UserScript to add a link to all YouTube video pages that points to the HTML5 version, leaving you with no excuse to still use the Flash interface!

All modern browsers that support basic HTML5 are supported. You’ll need to have an MP4 decoder installed on your PC. Happy viewing!

Facebook is the world’s largest social network

with more than 800 million active users around the world, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population.

Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room at Harvard, Facebook grew from being a quirky site for college students into a popular platform that is used to sell cars and movies, win over voters in presidential elections and organize protest movements. It offers advertisers a global platform, with the exception of China, where Facebook does not operate.

Facebook took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Feb. 1, 2012, when it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that. In its filing, Facebook said it was seeking to raise $5 billion. The company will seek to have the ticker “FB” for its shares, but did not list an exchange.

Many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that would value it near $100 billion. At that lofty valuation, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Abbott Labs, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor.

Trading of the stock is expected to begin by late May 2012.

The filing sheds some light on how its meteoric run has turned the upstart into a formidable money-maker. The company, which makes the bulk of its money from advertising and the sale of virtual goods, recorded revenue of $3.7 billion in 2011, a 88 percent increase from the prior year. During that period, Facebook posted a profit of $1 billion. It is still a fraction of the size of rival Google, which recorded revenue of $37.9 billion in 2011, but many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct more and more capital to the Web’s social hive.

Facebook, unlike any other site, has come to define the social era of the Web. More than a portal, its value lies in its dynamic network of social connections and the massive amount of information shared by its users. Facebook, in many ways, is a data processor, archiving and analyzing every shred of information, from our interests, to our locations, to every article and link that we “like.” The collection of data is a potential goldmine for advertisers, keen to better understand and target consumers.

The social network has become something like an economy onto itself, fostering businesses like the music service Spotify. Game-maker Zynga, which went public late in 2011, generates more than 90 percent of its sales from Facebook.