Rapportive is a free browser plugin (available as both a Firefox add-on and as a Chrome extension) for that replaces the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc). It provides similar functionality to Xobni, the popular plugin for Outlook that we’ve covered previously, and MailBrowser, a third-party Gmail extension app that I wrote about back in January.
Installation is simple and takes less than a couple of minutes, and as it’s just a browser plugin it provides a neater solution than MailBrowser, because it doesn’t require you running a separate application for it to work. Once it’s set up, clicking on an email will pull up the sender’s biographical information in Gmail’s right-hand sidebar (where adverts are normally served) and links to their social media accounts; you can also use it to store private notes on each contact.
The service pulls contact information from the Rapleaf database, so the amount of biographical information and links to social media accounts that are returned will depend on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie that contact’s email address to the various social media services. For some of my contacts it works very well, for others it returns little or no info (presumably because some people don’t use their work email address for social media accounts), but I still love the way it adds an extra useful layer of CRM-like functionality to Gmail with no effort on my part.
As Marshall Kirkpatrick notes over on ReadWriteWeb, the service doesn’t need your Gmail password to work — but it does have access to your emails (unlike Xobni and MailBrowser, which are local apps), and, as yet, does not have a privacy policy in place. In the comments thread on Kirkpatrick’s post, Rapportive co-founder Rahul Vohra says the reason there’s no privacy policy yet is that service was only opened up to “show some friends.” The app got picked up by the press and the company was caught off guard by its popularity; Vohra says the company is moving as fast as it can to put a policy in place.
(via The Next Web)
Let us know what you think of Rapportive below.
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Verizon continues to say it will launch its fourth-generation, super-fast Long Term Evolution wireless network to cover 100 million people by the end of this year, but it’s also been clear that it expects its LTE network speeds to be just 5-12 Mbps. So how does LTE — a technology that can deliver a theoretical 150 Mbps — get whittled down to less than a tenth of its top speed?
Thanks to the recent attention on the potential shortage of wireless spectrum for mobile broadband, and the hope that mobile broadband could act as a decent substitute for wired broadband, it’s worth figuring out how spectrum, cell towers and subscribers all factor into the speeds a wireless carrier can offer. Peter Rysavy, a wireless analyst, offers a great explanation using Verizon as an example. Note that in a Network World article, Tony Melone, executive VP and CTO of Verizon Wireless, confirmed that the carrier will use all of its 700 MHz spectrum for LTE service. Here’s what Rysavy has to say on that:
“Looking forward to advanced technologies such as LTE, capacity will higher, but it will still be extremely limited compared to wireline capacity. Verizon Wireless’ LTE network will operate in the 700 MHz band using 10 MHz radio channels. With a spectral efficiency of 1.5 bps/Hz, this delivers sector throughput of 15 Mbps. Meanwhile, there are about 1000 subscribers in the US for every cell site, which makes for an average of 333 subscribers per sector. If 10% of them were using the LTE data service, that would mean 33 users for the 15 Mbps data channel. Now, compare this with a subscriber of a wireline high‐speed Internet service of 50 Mbps that is dedicated, and not shared, as shown in Figure 2 (below). The point is not that the wireless network cannot deliver extremely useful and valuable services, since it can, but rather that wireless capacity is inherently limited compared to wireline capacity.”
Basically, Verizon can cram only a certain number of bits into each hertz — a function of how LTE allocates bits and a physics constraint. Multiply that number of bits times Verizon’s 10 MHz channels, which are dictated by regulatory policy as well as what Verizon paid for during the spectrum auction, and you have the top speed. Deliver those 15 Mbps channels to your cell sites (determined by Verizon’s investment decisions as well as community regulations that govern where towers are allowed) and divide by the number of devices sucking bits.
It’s complex math getting the infrastructure in place, but add in the infinite variables of iPads, smartphones, M2M sensors and even human traffic patterns and you have a situations in which delivering fast mobile broadband looks nothing short of miraculous.
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Compiled's Bob Locklear (left) and Jasson Casey
Compiled Networks, a stealthy Austin, Texas-based startup, is building an appliance that can securely link two clouds at the network level. But before it started on its cloud product the founders also managed to develop one that ISPs can use to deliver Wi-Fi that behaves less like a fixed wireless network and more like a cellular one, with seamless handoffs and one-time authentication. One unnamed ISP is already using it for its Wi-Fi network.
But Compiled, which is searching for a Series A round of $2.5 million, has its eye on the cloud. The software it uses to make a series of Wi-Fi access points into a seamless network can also run inside an appliance located inside a cloud, and virtually extend a data center’s Layer 2 Ethernet network to a cloud. In doing so it offers an IT operations person a level of security and control that they might not get from other private virtualized networks such as Amazon’s or even Savvis’s data-center-in-a-box offering, which tend to operate by managing IP addresses at Layer 3.
Jasson Casey, founder and CEO of Compiled, says the company’s appliances allow an IT manager to build a virtualized version of a network inside a cloud, without adding latency or requiring the addition of more CPU power. Other companies are attempting to virtualize the network and bridge clouds using managed software but Casey believes those methods are unwieldy and won’t scale as well.
Casey didn’t offer any more details about the software, citing the company’s relative stealth, but said for now it is working on a deal with a large cloud provider that could buy the Compiled appliance and pop it into the its cloud as a way to offer customers a more secure form of virtualized networking. In order to work, the Compiled appliance has to be inside the cloud, which could be a barrier for the company if it can’t get large infrastructure-as-a-service providers interested. Even large companies trying to move applications and workloads to public clouds may not have the cachet to demand a Savvis or Terremark put an appliance inside the ones they offer.
In the meantime, Compiled has a cloud product and a potential partner willing to try it in its cloud, and a deal with an unnamed ISP for its Wi-Fi product. I will say that the company has certainly managed to straddle two large markets with its technology. Now we just need to see if it can sell into them.
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Over on The Big Think, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried has posted an interesting short video about how the modern workplace is designed to provide constant interruptions (phone calls, meetings, colleagues dropping by your desk), and how that’s a real productivity killer:
Fried says that project management tools, IM, collaboration apps and email can be used to reduce those constant interruptions, because if you’re busy you can put them to one side until you have time to deal with them.
As web workers, we’re fortunate in that we typically don’t work in regular office. But we’re still subject to interruptions, and as such can also use tools and careful scheduling to reduce their frequency and boost productivity. Rather than an update meeting, for example, try using an app to keep your colleagues in the loop. Interruptions jolt you out of “the zone,” so if meetings or conference calls are absolutely required, scheduling them back-to-back will reduce the number of interruptions to your working day. WWD’s “Productivity Superstar” columnist Karen posted some great tips for reducing distractions in “7 Ways to Find Your Focus,” and for those working from home, complete with distractions like having to answer the doorbell and dealing with family members, Georgina provided “5 Focus Killers…and How to Beat Them.”
It’s also worth considering how your actions impact the people you work with — do you really need to phone them, or call a meeting? Do you need an answer immediately? As Karen says, productivity isn’t just something we give ourselves. It’s a gift we give other people as well.
What techniques do you use to minimize interruptions?
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Google for the past three years has been trying to upend the enterprise market’s leading software suite, Microsoft Office, with its cloud-based Google Apps. With cloud services now being widely adopted in the enterprise, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s offering is starting to pull ahead.
Google currently claims some 2 million entities as Google Apps users, from small businesses to large corporations such as Motorola and Genentech to cities such as Los Angeles and educational institutions such as Yale University. “Google Apps are growing quite rapidly, especially in the educational sector,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, told me. The number of people actively using Google Apps now tops 20 million.
The primary driver of Google Apps is no doubt Google Mail. Based on the extremely popular and excellent Gmail service, Google Mail is gaining popularity because it works with established products such as Microsoft Outlook and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. When I asked Sheth if Google was going to announce Google Buzz for the enterprise, he said: “We are planning to roll it out for businesses but with requisite policy and privacy controls.” Though when that’s likely to happen he wouldn’t say.
Google has seen a marked change in people’s attitudes towards cloud-based services such as Google Apps, which has resulted in it signing on dozens of large companies as customers in the last year alone. “Three years ago people said no way, and now more and more organizations see the benefits of cloud-based services,” said Ben Lutch, director of engineering for Google Apps. As he and Sheth explained, Google Apps’ biggest advantages are its availability and its disaster recovery features, the result of its ability to do “synchronous replication” very quickly and very cheaply.
All Google Apps are written on top of the Google File System, which gives the company the unique ability to not only write data to multiple locations insider a specific data center, but also across the multiple data center locations that make up the global Google infrastructure. Since these globally dispersed locations are connected to each other with very high-speed fiber connections, Google can literally save bits of your information across the globe. (Related: Google’s Infrastructure Is Its Strategic Advantage.)
“Because we are using a vertically integrated set of hardware and software, that essentially frees us from being dependent on third parties, where as other companies are dependent on these third parties,” Lutch said. “We do this to ensure that we are front and center of our infrastructure needs and we don’t have to wait for others to really help us.” Google has developed its own hardware — both computing- and communications-oriented — to work with its own software, which is essentially the Google File System.
“Software is our secret sauce,” boasted Lutch. “Our infrastructure is built on the assumption that there is and will be a failure somewhere so we have put an emphasis on working around those failures. We have done so by focusing primarily on software.”
A post on the Google Enterprise Blog offers additional detail:
In larger businesses, companies will add a storage area network (SAN), which is a consolidated place for all storage. SANs are expensive, and even then, you’re out of luck if your data center goes down. So the largest enterprises will build an entirely new data center somewhere else…..But if, heaven forbid, disaster strikes both your data centers, you’re toast. How do you know if your disaster recovery solution is as strong as you need it to be? It’s usually measured in two ways: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO is how much data you’re willing to lose when things go wrong, and RTO is how long you’re willing to go without service after a disaster. Enterprises without SANs may be literally trucking tapes back and forth between data centers, so as you can imagine their RPOs and RTOs can stretch into days. As for small businesses, often they just have to start over….For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our RTO design target is instant failover. To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that’s per employee. That doesn’t even include the cost of the applications. The exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider. We also replicate all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free.
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Feature image courtesy of Flickr user OmarCaf, in-post image courtesy of Flickr user Andy Ciordia
The Onion has a spot-on spoof today of Google’s alarming level of clarity about our personal lives: “Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology.” The article plays on the Goog’s knowledge of its users through search terms, chat, email, street view, and its ability to communicate with them in all the online and mobile locales they frequent: the Google homepage, Chrome browser, YouTube and Android phones. You’ll probably giggle:
“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”
It goes on:
“I’d like nothing more than to apologize in person to everyone we’ve let down, but as you can see, many of our users are rarely home at this hour,” said Google cofounder and president Sergey Brin, pointing to several Google Map street-view shots of empty bedroom and living room windows on a projection screen behind him.
Picture is part of a composite image from The Onion; please click through to see the whole thing and their full text.
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