I would like to keep our customers, partners and all well-wishers informed on what we are up to and what we observe as the most promising trends and updates in the technology world. If this is of interest to you, I would love to hear your comments.

#1 Mobility: This should come as no surprise. The daily M&A news around mobility is shouting loud and clear that every technology company wants mobile as a component of their product strategy. From SAP's acquisition of Sybase and Google's acquisition of AdMob to Twitter's acquisition of mobile clients - it's a frenzy as never seen before. Eric Schmidt famously announced at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona that Google now has a "mobility first" corporate strategy. Everything that it does will be first done for mobile devices and then for the Web. Steve Jobs declared that as Apple gets on a run rate of $50 billion a year in sales, it is now essentially a mobile devices company.

In a recent survey it was discovered that most people would feel more nervous if they left home in the morning without a cell phone than if they left without their wallet. Over 30% said the last thing they did before going to sleep was to check their messages on their cell phones and the first thing they did on waking up was check their phone for messages. (SMS, voice mail and social messages on Facebook or Twitter.)Mobility is Trend #1#2 Open Source: At a recent conference on Drupal (DrupalCon, San Francisco) where Web Spiders was a sponsor, it was heartening to see how open source worked. We met the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, at the conference (twitter.com/dries). Also, the core group of maintainers was present, and there was a lot of conversation about Drupal 7. As many of you know, there is no single company working on the growth of Drupal. It is led by volunteers and managed by the maintainers. None of these people are paid by anyone. Still the platform has become so strong that even the White House official Website is now on Drupal. Interestingly, Microsoft was present in a big way and is now actively supporting PHP and Drupal for its IIS Web Server. See: https://uatblog.webspiders.com/new-sql-server-driver-for-php-from-microsoft.

In UK, it has been made compulsory for government bodies to include open source as an option in their RFPs. Some of the best innovation in the market today is open source like Android, Firefox, Chrome, Drupal CMS and hundreds of other software components. These are routinely used by technology companies who include them as building blocks of their products. Open source is not new, but the year 2010 is seeing the maturity and acceptance of open source - from the Fortune 500 companies to the White House.Open Source is Trend #2#3 Enterprise Social Media: Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but what we see today is Enterprise adoption of Social Media. Many have famously scoffed at Twitter and Facebook and alluded to their lack of real benefits in the enterprise world. The year 2010 is seeing a turnaround of that thought process.

The Websites of most major corporations today carry links to their Twitter and Facebook profiles. Twitter has become the de facto standard to announce and share news, updates and links. Many use Twitter and Facebook stream as an RSS reader. ALL news sites publish to social media. This trend is nothing short of being revolutionary. The digital marketing domain is evolving from Search Engine Optimization to Social Media Optimization. Moving on from using Social Media for marketing, many corporations are using private social media platforms to create a social private graph within their firewalls for internal communication. MS Office 2010 has social connectors in Outlook and most technology companies today now provide integration of their products into popular social platforms.Enterprise Social Media is Trend

Siddharth Jhunjhunwala

CEO, Web Spiders Group

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