Artesia Spotlight: April 6th, 2009

Artesia Spotlight is a bi-weekly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Research Spotlight

A new University of Melbourne study has discovered that a reasonable amount of web surfing for fun at the workplace can actually increase the employees' productivity. According to the researchers, web surfing can help workers take short mental breaks, which leads them to a higher total concentration level throughout the work day. However, the researchers also note that this is only true when browsing is done in moderation and can be counter productive for people with internet addiction tendencies.

Video Spotlight

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Tim O'Reilly, one of the "inventors" of the term Web 2.0, delivered a short presentation about the future of the Web. In his view, the Web is getting smarter, but there is still a lot we can do to make it really smart. One of the things that will be increasingly important is the use of various sensors and connecting them to provide value. Also, O'Reilly suggested that we'll need to find ways to apply Moore's Law to world's great problems. You can also view other presentations from the Web 2.0 Expo on the official video channel.

Other news

• Google has announced Google Ventures, Google's venture capital found, which is looking to invest in "a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care".
• Salesforce.com, the leading provides of online CRM solutions, has integrated Twitter into its Service Cloud tool, which allows companies to keep track of customer conversations all over the web.
• ExecTweets is a new website that allows you to find and follow top business executives on Twitter. The website is sponsored by Microsoft.
• Skype is now moving into the corporate telephony market by announcing support for the SIP protocol, which is the leading voice over Internet protocol used in businesses telephony networks. This will enable companies to make cheap phone calls from their office phones to any other phone.
• YouTube has launched YouTube EDU, a page that aggregates lectures and news from over 100 US higher education institutes.