Image credit: roywylam / 123RF Stock Photo

If you employ knowledge workers, they pretty much expect you to provide them with desktops and laptops and a pile of productivity software. But for most business execs, it’s become a painfully expensive four-year cycle.  You have to buy new systems, license software upgrades, and retain highly paid IT professionals to do nothing but manage it all.

And it’s unavoidable, right? Taking a laptop away from a productive knowledge worker has about the same emotional reaction as taking a car away from a teenager. But wait.  There’s a new (yet old) alternative coming out of the cloud.  It’s called Desktop as a Service, or DaaS, and there’s a resurgence of interest in the technology and newer variations on the theme, led by a variety of distinctly different Desktop as a Service offerings.

It’s also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Back in the day, it was known as Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Services. Lots of corporate IT departments headed down the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure path — only to find that VDI doesn’t save much while pissing people off.  As such, it was relegated to a few very limited uses – like providing secure access to highly sensitive applications.

There’s a variety of drivers behind the renewed interest in virtual desktops. Foremost among them is the hope that someone else can do it cheaper and better than your own IT team.  Not far behind that for many organizations is the need to support a wide variety of devices as workers, contractors and other bring in their own devices to use for business purposes. Finally, and most significantly, there’s a chance for DaaS providers to add real value by creating virtual desktop environments with key industry applications already integrated — one offering for law offices, another for small practice physicians, you get the picture.

DaaS offerings look as though they’re already falling into three camps:

1. Full Hosted Desktop Services. This is an easy way for businesses to replace “fat” desktops with simple display devices. These could be simple terminals, Chromebooks, iPads, Android phones or anything else that can run a browser. This is a model that most IT teams — if you have one — will understand fairly well. This hosted VDI model has an all-or-nothing aspect to it that may not be right for many needs and budgets. Dell sells DaaS “bundles” starting at $50 per user per seat. That however doesn’t include the display device on the user’s desk, Windows licensing (and no, your existing licenses won’t cover this service), or what Dell calls “cloud based management”.
2. Hosted Applications. In this approach individual apps are packaged up into virtual machines which run on the service provider’s remote servers.  The model allows you to offer apps individually.  Businesses can pick which apps must be run centrally through a service, and which can be run natively on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone .  Services such as these provide a lot of flexibility without forcing everyone into exactly the same set of tools or requiring a good Internet connection for all uses.  Perhaps you want MS-Word for those who use Windows, Pages for iPad users, but the same version of an expense accounting system everyone in your business.  Hosted apps may provide the means to do what you want. An example of such a service is ExternalIT’s OS33, which provides a single portal for windows and web-based apps. Pricing is based on resource usage.
3. The Web Portal. If all of this feels all so last millennium to you, a SaaS Portal may make more sense.  In this case, vendors collect together a number of SaaS applications and support them through a single entry point.  One place to sign-on.  One password. To the extent possible, apps are also “pre-integrated”, meaning they can share data.  Both the password issue and the integration issue are real and at least in theory, such a product could make people more productive and save you lots of money.  Okta is an example of such a portal, and is priced at $1 per month per user.

Each of these virtual desktop models makes sense for certain uses. If you could start with a completely clean slate, the Web Portal approach is probably the most scalable and doesn’t get in the way of preserving the experience so important to those using their favorite device. Hosted apps are a good way to get around thorny restrictions – for example, some applications still require the use of IE6 even though it’s a security nightmare. Hosted access will keep IE6 out of your offices — and your data out of the hands of hacker.

I don’t expect any of these virtual desktop models will save significantly over the typical four-year replacement cycle. So The best reasons to pursue any one of them is either make your employees more productive, or offer more applications more reliably.

I’ll be taking a closer look at the virtual desktop products in each of these camps and see how they stack up for typical business use. I expect to see a variety of pricing scenarios, but also some commonalities such as setting new employees up more rapidly (provisioning) as well as nearly universal device support.

What’s going to set them apart?  Tell me what you’d like to know! Had some experience with these various approaches already?  Share your experience.

It’s not uncommon to have an account contact prospect respond with pleasant surprise. “I hadn’t heard that yet,” they typically tell me. “How did you know?”

It’s a productive way to establish and build credibility. Most of the best sales people I know have been almost obsessive users of Google’s free service.

But with the July 1 demise of Google Reader there’s emerged a great deal of speculation about the fate of its sister Web tool Google Alerts. Updates for the popular program have all but stopped. Many active users report that they’re receiving fewer alerts. Some even say they’re not receiving Alerts at all.

So I’ve been looking for a worthy alternative.  In that quest, I discovered a tool called Mention.  Mention allows you to receive real-time alerts for your brand, your industry, your company, your name or your competitors — any mentions, at all, whether it’s on the web and social or in social media. Sound familiar?

It does. Except that Mention provides much richer, deeper capabilities than Google Alerts. You can do all of this right from your phone or desktop:

• Media and Social Monitoring. Monitor millions of sources in 42 languages and don’t miss anything published on social networks, news sites, forums, blog or any web page.
• Anti-Noise Technology. Remove the noise coming from homonyms and spam by using their in-house technology that learns from your behavior.
• Team Work. Share your alerts with any user and assign tasks to your team members, in real-time right from your smartphone or desktop. Leverage the power of your team.
• Live Alerts. Get alerted in real-time via email and push notifications of new mentions. Don’t waste any time. React quickly and efficiently.
• All Devices. Access mention from anywhere. Use the web app, Chrome app, desktop version for PC, Mac or Linux or mobile version with the iPhone or Android app.
• Smart Actions. You can react to any mention the smart way. ReTweet a mention, share positive mentions directly on your Facebook page….
• Priority mentions. Most important mentions are flagged according to several criteria : influence and authority of the source and latest interactions you had with them.
• Statistics & data Export tool. Get an overview of your mentions by source, language, over a selected period of time, generate PDF reports or export data in CSV format to analyze them your own way.

I especially like the Smart Actions capability, which allows me to respond with a Tweet or mention using the social platform that I know a customer may be monitoring. The statistics and data export capabilities are keen, too, especially metrics maniacs.

As with most web tools, Mention comes in a free version and premium versions for individuals at $19.99 month and a team version for group use at $99 per month. Free gets you three alerts, 500 mentions, and analytics for one month, the Pro plan for single users offers unlimited alerts, 50,000 mentions and an unlimited history, while Team Plan gets you that plus multiusers.

If there’s any concern I have with Mention it’s on this count.  I’d like to see a package more suited for the individual contributor or entrepreneur. Adding a plan between its Free and Pro plans that with 1,000 alerts, 5,000 mentions per month, 3 months of history and Stats access for at $5.99 would open a major market for Mention consisting of anybody and everybody in sales, not to mention the millions of small business owners. The Free plan might actually turn away customers after they have experienced the Pro Plan features during their trial.

Google Alerts is still functioning for some, especially those with five or fewer alerts, but if you are an active user that is dependent on getting this type of information to perform your job well, check out Mention

Three questions that I would like your responses to:

1. Is Google Alerts still working for you?
2. Have you noticed any slowdown?
3. Have you found any other alternatives that are working for you?

Please offer your answers in the comments section of this post.

Among today’s hyper-connected consumers, even a single bad comment or review — just one — can have far-reaching affects.  When a negative comment goes viral, it can spread among thousands (and in some cases millions) of people who, as a direct result, may never do business with you or your company ever again.

Word-of-mouth has always been a major factor in making or breaking a business or product. But now marketplace reputation is more crucial than ever.  With the rapid growth of social media and mobile computing buying decisions have become much more of a “social” process. So, whether you’re a local retailer, restaurateur, financial advisor, doctor or dentist — any business of any size in fact — you need to take an active role in managing your online reputation.

Here’s how: Several new, affordable, and increasingly effective tools are available to help you find, analyze and, respond to comments and reviews about your business.

In fact, depending on the reputation management technology you choose, you may find yourself realizing other benefits, too. They can help you improve your website’s search ranking, generate new leads, track the “buzz” about your brand, identify and engage key influencers, or respond to customer service issues.

Because I live and work in Telluride, CO, a popular tourist destination, I not only recommend these online tools often, I also spend the time to show people how to properly use them.

Effective reputation management comes down to three inter-related processes — listening, analyzing and engaging.

• Listen. You must start by scouring the web for and asking yourself a series of essential questions: Where in terms of apps and web sites are people posting things about my business? Who’s saying what about my business (or brand)? How influential are they? Is what’s being said about my business good, bad or indifferent (sentiment)? What’s triggering the negative comments or reviews? How complete and accurate are my listings in the various online directories and review apps? What’s being said about my competitors, and how does my business compare against others? Today’s reputation management tools will help you uncover what’s being said about you on traditional websites in blogs, news articles, and groups.  But they’ll also help you track down comments on social media sites (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter), online directories (411.com, DexKnows, MerchantCircle and Superpages), check-in apps (Foursquare), review and comment sites (Yelp and Trip Advisor) and even industry-specific review sites (Wellness.com, Doctoroogle.com.) Look for a solution that gets data feeds from as many of the websites and apps your customers are using.

• Analyze. If you don’t understand the relevance of what you’ve “heard,” then listening won’t matter. You need a way to help find trends, patterns, and insights. The more content the more important the software’s analysis capabilities become.  Understanding where, geographically, the comments are coming from, gaining insight into the influence of those commenting, and most importantly, analyzing the sentiment (good, neutral or bad) all critical to the reputation management process.

• Engage. In some instances you may find that responding is appropriate.  In a small business it’s very important that this is done constructively, using the right tone and when appropriate making the right offer.  As a small business owner, it’s critical that you, yourself, be actively involved in crafting the response.  After all it’s your reputation on the line.  In larger businesses, where there are many departments and people in those departments that may be responsible for responding to a comment that’s found, (for example, someone in marketing or sales may need to respond to a selling opportunity while someone in customer service may need to respond to a product question), automated workflow functionality will be useful so that issues requiring a follow-up can be routed to the right person quickly for a response.

There’s a wide variety of reputation management technology solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, but I’m taking a closer look at three that seem especially promising:

• Vendasta. The Vendasta reputation management solution is part of a suite of tools, all designed to help small businesses manage their Web presence.  Its Reputation Management module focuses on helping businesses to verify and “claim” their online business listings, monitor what customers are saying about them, and protect themselves from defamation. It also performs some basic competitive benchmarking.  Its separate Brand Analytics module rolls up analytics to help businesses “look” across multiple regions and locations. Yet a third module allows you to create “responsive” mobile websites and landing pages and to conduct social media marketing campaigns. The company’s Reputation Management solution is priced at under $50/month per location.

• Chatmeter. Chatmeter is specifically designed to help chains or franchise businesses that need to manage one or more brand reputations on a local, regional or national level.  It offers location-based analytics from a national level down to a local level, workflows to facilitate follow up, competitive benchmarking, and search ranking performance analytics. It’s priced under $50/month per location, but the more locations you have, the lower the cost per location.

• Trackur – Trackur was founded by online reputation expert Andy Beal and is a more traditional social-media monitoring tool at a price that small businesses can afford.  Trackur allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall social media visibility, identifies opportunities for engagement, provides influence and sentiment analysis, and assesses competitor activity and share of voice. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what customers think about specific topics, brands or products. Trackur offers a 10-day free trial followed by a “Basic” plan for $27/month or a “Plus” Plan for $97/month.

Reputation management and social media monitoring has taken hold at many mid to large-sized companies.  Not so much among small businesses, however, and that surprises me.  In some ways, a small business has more at stake.

As I evaluate Vendata, Chatmeter, and Trackur, I’d like to address as many questions that you have about them — or the reputation management software segment.  So let me know what’s on your mind. Share your horror stories, and, most of all, how you recovered from a bash that went viral.

Image credit: roywylam / 123RF Stock Photo

If you employ knowledge workers, they pretty much expect you to provide them with desktops and laptops and a pile of productivity software. But for most business execs, it’s become a painfully expensive four-year cycle.  You have to buy new systems, license software upgrades, and retain highly paid IT professionals to do nothing but manage it all.

And it’s unavoidable, right? Taking a laptop away from a productive knowledge worker has about the same emotional reaction as taking a car away from a teenager. But wait.  There’s a new (yet old) alternative coming out of the cloud.  It’s called Desktop as a Service, or DaaS, and there’s a resurgence of interest in the technology and newer variations on the theme, led by a variety of distinctly different Desktop as a Service offerings.

It’s also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Back in the day, it was known as Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Services. Lots of corporate IT departments headed down the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure path — only to find that VDI doesn’t save much while pissing people off.  As such, it was relegated to a few very limited uses – like providing secure access to highly sensitive applications.

There’s a variety of drivers behind the renewed interest in virtual desktops. Foremost among them is the hope that someone else can do it cheaper and better than your own IT team.  Not far behind that for many organizations is the need to support a wide variety of devices as workers, contractors and other bring in their own devices to use for business purposes. Finally, and most significantly, there’s a chance for DaaS providers to add real value by creating virtual desktop environments with key industry applications already integrated — one offering for law offices, another for small practice physicians, you get the picture.

DaaS offerings look as though they’re already falling into three camps:

1. Full Hosted Desktop Services. This is an easy way for businesses to replace “fat” desktops with simple display devices. These could be simple terminals, Chromebooks, iPads, Android phones or anything else that can run a browser. This is a model that most IT teams — if you have one — will understand fairly well. This hosted VDI model has an all-or-nothing aspect to it that may not be right for many needs and budgets. Dell sells DaaS “bundles” starting at $50 per user per seat. That however doesn’t include the display device on the user’s desk, Windows licensing (and no, your existing licenses won’t cover this service), or what Dell calls “cloud based management”.
2. Hosted Applications. In this approach individual apps are packaged up into virtual machines which run on the service provider’s remote servers.  The model allows you to offer apps individually.  Businesses can pick which apps must be run centrally through a service, and which can be run natively on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone .  Services such as these provide a lot of flexibility without forcing everyone into exactly the same set of tools or requiring a good Internet connection for all uses.  Perhaps you want MS-Word for those who use Windows, Pages for iPad users, but the same version of an expense accounting system everyone in your business.  Hosted apps may provide the means to do what you want. An example of such a service is ExternalIT’s OS33, which provides a single portal for windows and web-based apps. Pricing is based on resource usage.
3. The Web Portal. If all of this feels all so last millennium to you, a SaaS Portal may make more sense.  In this case, vendors collect together a number of SaaS applications and support them through a single entry point.  One place to sign-on.  One password. To the extent possible, apps are also “pre-integrated”, meaning they can share data.  Both the password issue and the integration issue are real and at least in theory, such a product could make people more productive and save you lots of money.  Okta is an example of such a portal, and is priced at $1 per month per user.

Each of these virtual desktop models makes sense for certain uses. If you could start with a completely clean slate, the Web Portal approach is probably the most scalable and doesn’t get in the way of preserving the experience so important to those using their favorite device. Hosted apps are a good way to get around thorny restrictions – for example, some applications still require the use of IE6 even though it’s a security nightmare. Hosted access will keep IE6 out of your offices — and your data out of the hands of hacker.

I don’t expect any of these virtual desktop models will save significantly over the typical four-year replacement cycle. So The best reasons to pursue any one of them is either make your employees more productive, or offer more applications more reliably.

I’ll be taking a closer look at the virtual desktop products in each of these camps and see how they stack up for typical business use. I expect to see a variety of pricing scenarios, but also some commonalities such as setting new employees up more rapidly (provisioning) as well as nearly universal device support.

What’s going to set them apart?  Tell me what you’d like to know! Had some experience with these various approaches already?  Share your experience.

The four-year-old AnyMeeting has already attracted a self-proclaimed 300,000 users, mainly by offering lower priced Web meeting plans that are subsidized by advertising. If you can put up with the ads, then you can host — for free — as many as 200 people in an online conference complemented with many of the same tools you’d get from more expensive alternatives, including screen-sharing, built-in conference calling, and 6-way video calling. Even the ad-free option comes at an attractive price of $17.99 a month for as many as 25 participants — compared to the $49 a month that WebEx and GTM charge for a similar level of service.

The company announced its offer in a press release issued April 2.

While AnyMeeting’s promotion says something about its chutzpah, it says even more about the growing reliance among businesses on tools that enable people to collaborate when they’re here, there, and everywhere. The conference room is out. Sitting in on a meeting via a desktop browser, tablet, or smart phone is in. WebEx was early to the segment. GoToMeeting became one of its first, best challengers. But over the last few years, the market has attracted a growing number of alternatives.

We’ve started taking a look at some of them, including BlueJeans, FuzeBox, Crunched, , StartMeeting, MeetingBurner, UberConference, Join.me and ScreenLeap. And we’ve put one of them, iMeet, under intense scrutiny by way of an evaluation that netted it a score of 86.

If you’ve had experience with any of them — or others — let me hear from you. Just a few of the questions I’m contemplating as we assess Web conferencing tools: What do you want most from a Web conferencing service? Reliability? Simplicity? A variety of meeting tools — screen sharing, pass-through control, video, annotation? Video? Scale — as in being able to handle lots of people?

Lately, I’ve been like a slice of bread cast upon the pond, as we’ve been putting my own company’s every business process into the cloud. With each and every service subscription — whether it’s accounting, project management, software engineering, you name it — my providers keep sinking their beaks into the corporate checking account, again and again, as we upgrade, add some new features, or increase our storage. Peck, peck, peck.

Which is why I watched so intently as Leo Salazar led me through the new service he and Shawn Nagar have been working on for three years. It promises to allow you to create your very own very private cloud with just about every basic business app you need and — get this — for $10 per user.

That’s $10. Not a month. Not a year. That’s $10 — once and forever after. And if you’re a skinflint who’s also paranoid, Leo and Shawn will let you host your own cloud on your own servers for just $25 more per server. Not $25 a month mind you. But $25 just once.

They’re doing this through their Florida-based startup — their latest — called MeghaWare, and a service called CloudTop, consisting of almost a dozen different basic apps for business productivity — email, document storage, collaboration, chat, to name a few, as well as one for creating your own cloud on your own hardware.

I’m recommending it for a serious look-see — we’ll evaluate it more deeply here at CloudBase3 as time goes on — especially for small-to-medium businesses and for three reasons.

1. It’s a one-stop solution.
2. It cuts out the cost for best-of-breed apps, like Dropbox for storage and sharing, Yammer or internal chat, or Carbonite for backup.
3. It eliminates the mark up a typical cloud app provider charges to store your data, documents, and archives on a hosting service. You can go direct.

With a few simple clicks, you can set up your own cloud instance on Amazon, RackSpace, or AT&T — at a price lower than what your application provider charges for using, in most cases, the same service anyway. Hey, want to assure security, disaster recovery, and redundancy for your corporate jewels. Then set up parts of your business on all three or more.

Leo has actually been talking to me for months — even before MeghaWare unveiled CloudTop last January. But it wasn’t until this week’s CloudConnect conference that I got to meet him and his co-founder in person. They took me through a demo. I don’t know how it works under live conditions. But it looked very promising — particularly at its one-time per user price of $10.

I’m stopping short of endorsing CloudTop until we test it more. I already see some issues. For example, there’s a question about how far MeghaWare can go in providing enough apps to beat the best-of-breed big boys. Can they keep up in the arms race of features and functions every software vendor eventually confronts?

And the second this is — grrr: It’s been developed so far for Windows and Android. Leo says versions for Mac and iOS are due for the end of Q2.

Meanwhile, it’s worth your time to kick the tires. I asked Leo to pitch me his product in a Tweet-like length. He said CloudTop lets you “manage your content, your presence, and privacy within your own cloud.”

If MeghaWare delivers, then a lot of business managers may be telling more expensive cloud services to go “duck” themselves.

We’re noting the five following headlines for their importance to business managers wrestling with when, where, why, and how to adopt cloud services.

Why Cloud is Actually the SAFEST Place for Your Data (Cloud Computing News)

Key excerpt: There are significant benefits from trusting a cloud provider with your data. For the right providers, securing the platform and the customer data are priorities for their business, and due to their scale they will have resources to spend which your organisation is unlikely to match. They will have dedicated staff whose role it is to ensure the platform and data are secure on an on-going basis, and they will be keeping up-to-date with all the relevant threats …

CB3 Insight: Lots of business leaders still fear the cloud. While you remain aware of the risk of leaving the company jewels in the hands of someone outside your company’s own vaults, there’s good and valid reason to believe it’ll actually be safer there. This piece outlines more than one of those reasons.

How Businesses Can Benefit From Cloud Services (Business Review Weekly)

Key excerpt: Businesses can unwittingly be rushed into long-term contracts for cloud services that they are then locked into – as happens with mobile phone plans. It is essential to analyse your business requirements to determine what kind of cloud services are appropriate and to be aware of “cloud washing”, where providers rebadge their existing services as cloud.

CB3 Insight: There’s a lot of promise in the cloud. But there’s a lot of BS out there too. Buyer beware, beware, beware. Due diligence is essential.

6 Hidden Costs of Cloud & How to Avoid Them (CIO.com)

Key excerpt: The most common hidden costs are tied to rogue cloud use, complex backup and recovery, inefficient storage, compliance and eDiscovery issues and data in transit issues…

CB3 Insight: While this piece is written for CIOs, it calls out some “gotchas” that apply to anyone is any company of any size that’s moving critical parts of the business into the cloud.

Other headlines we’re following:

Cloud Computing for Collaboration (B2C)

Google Keep, an Overdue Answer to Evernote, Arrives (Wired

Lean Analytics: Use Data To Build A Better, Faster Startup (Book Review) (Forbes)

We’re noting the five following headlines for their importance to business managers wrestling with when, where, why, and how to adopt cloud services

1. Why Cloud Computing is Slowly Winning the Trust War (Forbes)

Forbes contributor Louis Columbus uses his contacts among skeptical CIOs to proclaim: Well, yes, the cloud is overcoming the fears about just how secure the company jewels are residing remotely under someone else’s control but as he notes:

“Every one of these CIOs spoken with, across a range of manufacturing companies, learned that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) aren’t sufficient to manage the areas of security, privacy and confidentiality on their own.”

Conclusion: Go there but armed with a hard nose. Get help in making sure those SLAs make sufficient assurances; try to determine whether your provider can in fact deliver on its promises.

2. Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy (Forbes)

Forbes Columbus scores twice in today’s round up, by reporting from a Microsoft conference for its partners and resellers where he found “how committed Microsoft is to becoming as cloud, devices and services company.”

Conclusion: So far as the cloud is concerned, Microsoft simply isn’t as dominant as it once was. And that’s been giving lots of its customers reasons to switch to more advanced cloud-based alternatives to everything Microsoft from its Office apps to Windows Server. But given the kind of commitment it’s trumpeting, it might be better to wait rather than switch.

3. How Rackspace is taking on Amazon (Fortune)

A standards battle is shaping up in the cloud. Compare it to the hue and cry against Microsoft’s proprietary Windows operating system, only in this era it’s Amazon with the walled garden. To compete, RachSpace continues to champion its OpenStack initiative, which has, by the way, been drawing support from the likes of none other than IBM.

“As Robert LeBlanc, IBM’s SVP of software said in a release announcing his company’s support for OpenStack: “The winner here will be customers, who will not find themselves locked into any one vendor — but be free to choose the best platform based on the best set of capabilities that meet that needs.”

Conclusion: Sorry to take you down into the weeds. But this is one of those inside-baseball developments that’s bound to become material. Remember, “closed” limits your later choices. “Open” doesn’t. And it you want to switch from one service to another, well…

4. Klout Launches Business Portal, is Gunning for Brands

Klout has been a leader in identifying the most important currency in the era of social media: influence. It’s not how many people who follow or friend you; it’s who. Klout is upping the game to help brands find and connect with the people who really matter to them in the marketplace.

“Today, Klout is making available a free analytics dashboard for companies with features that allow them to learn how influential their fans and followers are, which social networks the brand resonates most (or least) with, which social networks they should use more, which topics about the brand are most popular, and which “moments”—a Tweet or Facebook (FB) update, for example—get the most attention.”

Conclusion: Services like Klout are among the best the cloud has to offer to companies as they adopt to the new realities of marketing in a social, mobile, always-on world. So it pays to pay attention it.

5. Google Elbows Into the Cloud (NYT)

Google scares me — as much as Microsoft once did. It’s everywhere. And it’s dominant where ever it is. Now it’s ratcheting up its efforts within the cloud. Google was born as a cloud company. Its search is a cloud service. So are its email, Google docs, and Google Drive storage services. It has the same global, battle-hardened infrastructure that Amazon did when it extended itself beyond ecommerce to become the market’s leading cloud service others.

“Google said Tuesday that it was doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, and stepping up the hiring of engineers and others who work on cloud technology.”

Conclusion: In this case, competition is good and should hearken to more options and lower prices when it comes to business services.

Phones got smart. Cars, TVs, and houses did, too. In fact, is there anything once defined as “hardware” that isn’t dependent on software-infused intelligence anymore? Um, not so much. Just consider what headset-maker Plantronics and audio-video-conferencing-services provider PGi just unveiled by way of their budding partnership.

Plantronics is the maker best known for making wired and wireless telephone headsets. PGi has been providing corporate conferencing services for more than 20 years; it’s been pushing a new drop-in video conferencing service for small teams — a promising service for which I’ve just done an in-depth evaluation for its potential as an alternative to WebEx or GoToMeeting.

Plantronics is headquartered in Santa Cruz, CA, PGi in Atlanta. How they crossed the continental divide, so to speak, I don’t know. But they did. And the result has been a novel integration between Plantronics’ recently debuted Voyager Legend UC headset and PGi’s iMeet Web conferencing service.

Plantronics bestowed contextually aware smarts on the recently debuted Voyager Legend UC. Put the headset on and it’ll automatically answer an incoming call, or it’ll transfer an active call from your phone to the headset. The capability proved compelling enough to merit a special “Best of Innovations” award from among the thousands of gadgets exhibited at early January’s 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show.

Plantronics is making these capabilities available to developers and partners such as PGi as part of a broader cloud services initiative for connecting its gear to cloud applications. PGi is the biggest company to date to have taken advantage of them in a just released upgrade to iMeet. Now, for example, the headset itself actually recognizes whether someone has dropped into your iMeet video conferencing “room.” Or just by taking the headset off, iMeet will alert others in the room that you’ve just put yourself on mute.

It’s intriguing stuff, even if it remains unclear whether those who actually use the Voyager UC and iMeet together will habitually take advantage of these new features. Nevertheless, efforts of this kind are worth noting if only because they represent what’s sure to be an ongoing march toward ever smarter ways we’ll be able to work.