I found this image looking for icons, but it made me wonder how much of these I knew the name and what they do. I came to 26, and you?

Salesforce Chatter offers all the features you can expect from a ‘microblogging’ system: profiles, following, status updates, feeds, groups and sharing documents and links. In addition it also pulls in data from twitter, facebook so it becomes a social datamart.

A cloud based social collaboration platform is not new, even though this is offered on a tried and tested platform that many organizations trust with their sales data. And if you use Salesforce CRM you also get tight integration with accounts, contacts, opportunities, reports and dashboard.

Even more interesting is that it is architectured to be extended. I expect you should easily be able to add new functionality through the app exchange or build your own on the Force.com platform. As Salesforce puts it: “With the new Chatter social platform, social features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform”. I’d love to see it built out to more than just microblogging, for example with blogs, wiki’s and workflows.

The product was announce mid november 2009, it is scheduled to become generally available in calendar year 2010. Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.

A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user per month. Even though this will also include Salesforce Content and Force.com this is a surprisingly high cost. Especially since many microblogging tools are offered much cheaper or even for free.

But for existing Salesforce CRM customers this is an amazing offering. And Salesforce joining this application space is an interesting development.

We spent some time looking at different options. We tried a few high-end solutions, that deliver great quality, but they are too expensive to rollout to many offices.

Surely you can choose to have a few video conferencing hubs so you can cut down on intercontinental travel, but research that shows if people need to travel anyway they generally choose to travel all the way instead of doing the shorter travel to a VC location.

Hence we decided to investigate alternative, more cost efficient solutions. We ended up with LifeSize and Tandberg as close contenders based on desk research and demos. The final choice was made after having test units of both vendors in house and using them on our own network. Tandberg is more mature and polished, but we found LifeSize to work better with low bandwidth and they are a little cheaper.

The great news is that almost all our offices joined the project and we are looking to implement most of them in the first quarter of this year. Even better news is that our staff is eager to start using it. So I look forward to see many of them on screen soon – and to break even on the project in the first year.

Information is at our fingertips, but often we don’t even use a fraction of the potential of our data. But that is about to change. New web services are surfacing, they turn data into information, for use.

Companies gather information about their customers. Why do you think most large retail stores have discount cards? To get information about you. Because if you know about someone you can relate, if you know what people like you can offer them something suitable. If you can see patterns you can predict other things they like too. But not in every situation discount cards work. There isn’t always an opportunity to learn about consumer patterns.

The new breed of tools that is surfacing is taking a different approach. They combine data you have already, primarily from your email but also from your social networking accounts, and combine that with data available on the web. From the same social networking sites, search engines, blog feeds and so on. Companies can add information from their CRM systems too.

All this information is providing profiles most companies could never have dreamt of. Not just information about what your customers do with you, but about what really interests them, who their friends are, what they write about and more. Scary? Maybe, in some contexts. But also convenient. Would you rather have a conversation with someone that relates to you or a dork that has no clue? Do you like to be offered products you like, or random stuff you don’t care about?

The two tools that seem to be front runners of this movement are Gist and Xobni. Although they both take a different approach, in essence they are doing the same: combining data and making it valuable information to you.

Xobni, the Outlook plugin that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy. It is a plugin for outlook that combines your email data with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Salesforce and Hoover. It also offers features you’ll like as a personal user so it is worth checking out for yourself as well. The drawback? It is only available for Outlook, well and Blackberry too, but I’d love to have it for Mac, Gmail and iPhone too. I would even be willing to pay for it privately.

Gist helps you to “Know More About Who You Know”. I takes data from the same sources Xobni does, and additionally Gmail, CSV and vCard files, and combines that with information available on the web. It provides you with a host of information on people and companies and the relations between them. It even acts as a full fledged CRM system allowing you to create a dossier on people.

These are two good and distinct examples of how the game is changing. I’d be interested to hear about more examples if you know them.

Today an unusual piece of news called for attention in my work. Google is threatening to shut downs its operations in China, which likely would lead to the blocking of all Google services in the country.

As we have an office in Being and we use Google Apps for email and calendaring, we need a backup plan. Nothing too difficult, but good that we do not rely on it for office applications completely as that would have caused a bit more work.

Meanwhile the story is intriguing to follow.

Since arriving in China in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online

Google now said that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China’s attempts to “limit free speech on the Web.”

Human Rights and Free Speech organizations are pleased with Google’s standpoint and calling it “both the right move and a brilliant one”.

It does not seem likely the Chinese government will let Google leave, possibly starting a technologic exodus, but it is hard to say really.

Google is very serious about this as you can read in A new approach to China.

Last week at CES, Cisco unveiled its TelePresence system for consumer homes. The system used a set-top device, a remote control, a high-def camera, microphone, and a standard HDTV.

The device is expected to cost around $1,000 excluding the cost of the TV and consumers’ monthly Internet bills. The company plans to trial its telepresence technology with Verizon in the U.S. and with France Telecom in Europe before releasing it to a wider consumer base.

The announcement came on the heels of Skype launching its own HD video calling feature for PCs and on LG and Panasonic Internet-enabled HDTVs. So yes, Cisco is feeling Skype is becoming a contender.