Another Move on the Social Side of High Bandwidth Content
by Bill Ives
Rafat Ali recently discussed Cisco’s acquisitions of Five Across and tribe.net for their social networking technology. This was panned by some of the web 2.0 pundits. Rafat invented an interesting new word as he said the pundits were harshing Cisco, but perhaps that was a typo. However, Rafat pointed to a reasoned argument for the wisdom of the purchase by Danny Khatib. Danny’s post, Cisco is not dumb, makes a lot of sense to me. I think his most important point can be summed up in this excerpt:
“But today, the concept of personal networking has more directly embraced the concept of social networking - users demand sharing capabilities, and the user-generated craze has led to a bi-directional flow of content. So….if Cisco really wants to offer multiple devices in the home that allow for multimedia access and sharing, it will have to move up the stack and offer compelling web software and services that integrate seamlessly with its hardware systems, and those services will ultimately need to be social in scope.”
We continue to see that what happens on the web makes its way into the enterprise. That is one of the points of this blog. We are in the age where the social side of content is being explored in new ways. This certainly includes high bandwidth content. Look how quickly You Tube caught on as a business tool for sharing video business content. So if high bandwidth media sharing becomes even better enabled for the consumer, it will also become better enabled for the corporation. What about more easily passing around the video conferenced meeting or even enabling TIVO for the business video conference or corporate communication videos. Danny even suggested that Cisco might buy TIVO. Cisco’s purchase is just one more trend toward the enterprise 2.0 transformation. Thanks to Hylton for haring this.
