This is a guest post by David Chao 

It’s a brave new world for healthcare organizations. Hospitals and other providers are teaming up to form Accountable Care Organizations to take a coordinated, community-level approach to health care.

Health insurance companies are no longer passively paying off claims, but are becoming active managers of their policyholders’ health. Providers and payers are having to change what they do and how they do it.

This requires the use of technology to ensure a free flow of information across clinical and non-clinical systems and across legacy, cloud, mobile, and personal device platforms. As the number of systems increase, this integration challenge will only grow.

How can organizations successfully meet this integration challenge?

1. Eliminate point-to-point integrations

All too often in the past, health care organizations have built custom point-to-point integrations between systems, creating a tangled web of connections. Businesses should instead turn to an integration platform that provides a common interface for all systems.

2. Leverage learnings from other industries and adopt a best-of-breed systems approach

Experience from other industries tells us that sharing data through a single, inflexible system is doomed to failure (contrary to what what some heatlhcare vendors would have you believe). Instead, loose coupling of “best-of-breed” applications has proven to be a far more effective model. Initiatives such as the CommonWell alliance and the SMART API platform are on the right track, but more must be done to push healthcare IT vendors to open up their systems.

3. Be pragmatic 

It seems that as a response to outdated technology in healthcare IT, there is a tendency to over-engineer solutions. As Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg said, “done is better than perfect.” Case in point: the 10+ years it took for the HL7 v3 healthcare messaging standard to supersede HL7 v2. For many, v3 is now so bloated that it’s impractical. At the same time, use of v2 is so deep-seated that it can’t easily be replaced. Low-tech examples can be very successful, as we see from the adoption of DIRECT protocol (essentially secure email), and the popularity of the secure e-fax feature in Doximity’s doctor platform. When it comes to solving healthcare interoperability challenges, done is certainly better than perfect.

As we’re all well aware, when it comes to technology, the healthcare industry is struggling to play catch up. The HITECH and Affordable Care Acts have provided a real catalyst for change, and it is up to all of us who work in the healthcare space to ensure we work together to deliver on this promise.

David Chao is a Product Manager at MuleSoft where he leads MuleSoft’s healthcare business. In this role, he works with providers, payers and government bodies to improve patient outcomes and lower costs by solving the challenge of interoperability across healthcare systems.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yahoo Mail has integrated with cloud storage hotshot Dropbox so email users can send attachments of any size and save attachments to Dropbox, the companies announced today.

Yahoo has seen a lot of momentum toward major product improvements ever since CEO Marissa Mayer showed up on the scene last year. Yahoo Mail, Flickr, and the Yahoo homepage have all been given more attention, especially on the mobile front.

In today’s case, Yahoo email is getting a lot more handy, especially if you’re already a Dropbox user. Now Yahoo Mail users will be able to ditch attachment limits, save to Dropbox, and share using Dropbox.

Dropbox writes in a blog post:

Email attachments can be tricky: they’ve got file size limits, you can’t keep them updated, and when you add people to a thread, attachments are the first to get left behind.

The Yahoo! Mail team decided to fix this—by integrating with Dropbox! Starting later today, if you’re using a Yahoo! Mail account in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish, you’ll be able to access your Dropbox from right inside your inbox. You can add stuff from Dropbox to any email message and save attachments back to Dropbox, too.

Since this integration is Dropbox-powered, you can even send that big album of vacation pics without worrying about the 25 MB file limit. Plus, it’s easy to save any photo, video, or doc in your Yahoo! Mail straight to your Dropbox, where you can get to it from anywhere.

Top photo via Dropbox

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile payment company Bango has integrated Google Play billing with carrier billing, announcing Australian carrier Telestra as its first client.

The integration means that smartphone owners on Telestra’s network can now buy apps, music, movies, and more from Google Play, without having to pay Google — at least, not directly. Instead, the charges are simply added on to their current phone bill.

That’s a good thing for mobile carriers, since it extends the billing relationship they already have with clients and gives them a new revenue stream. It’s also good for users, who can purchase virtual items without having to give their credit card information to yet another company.

Whether it’s a good thing for Google is still an open question.

It’s obviously good if Google Play wins more use and more paying clients. But it’s not a great long-term move if it means Google is less likely to establish a direct billing relationship with end users and less likely to attach the holy grail of app store owners — a credit card — to a Google account.

Bango CEO Ray Anderson is pretty sure it’s a good thing:

“Android is winning the battle for smartphone market share,” he said in a statement. “As user numbers soar, we will see an increasing flow of developer talent and compelling content channelled through Google Play. We’re expecting that operator billing from Bango will boost conversion rates and developer monetization. It’s a new weapon in Google’s armory.”

All of which basically means that, as in other aspects of its Android strategy, Google is choosing to race to the base: get the widest number of smartphone owners using Android, regardless of how and of any potential complications.

But you can bet the company’s long-term goal is a direct, individual, and personal line straight to each consumer’s credit card — or digital wallet.

No, it’s no Google, and not even a Yahoo, but Ask.com still gets three percent of U.S.-based query volume, and had almost 150 million unique visitors in October 2012, according to Compete.com.

Which makes it about 100-150 Quoras.

Quixey indexes Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry apps not just by their title and description, but by everything that is said about them online. That makes Quixey’s results much more relevant, according to Quixey CEO Tomer Kagan.

“With apps we’ve taken a step forward in terms of functionality,” Kagan told me yesterday, “but a step back in terms of discoverability.”

Starting at 5PM today on Ask.com, app-related searches will automatically include apps in the primary search results. Alternatively, users who wish to restrict the search results to apps only, can simply click the Apps tab:

This is Quixey’s biggest integration to date, having previously integrated with companies such as Skyfire and Appthority.

The company is a B to B to C play, meaning that it does not provide services directly to consumers, but simply works through other consumer-facing companies. In fact, while Quixey has a website that demonstrates app search, there is not a single employee in the company whose responsibility it is to maintain that page, Kagan said.

The integration means that searching for apps will be a whole lot easier — and better, Kagan says.

“Often an app is a better result than a web page,” Kagan told me. “For example, if I want to find the best hikes in my area.”

From Ask.com’s perspective, adding app search rounds out its results, and opens new doors. For example, queries such as “watch Toy Story” will now include links to Netflix and Hulu, where users can actually watch the entire movie.

“Apps are gateways to some of the most top-notch digital content out there, so this integration fits perfectly with where our product is headed, especially when it comes to mobile devices,” Ask COO  Shane McGilloway said in a statement.

photo credit: schnaars via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

How do you do the cloud right? Salesforce showed off a case study of enterprise integration today at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference in Redwood City, Calif.

Elias Dayeh (pictured right), director of business operation at Axcient,  a hybrid-cloud-based data protection service, said that one of the myths is that a company can bring in Salesforce and implement its cloud-based sales solution in a “magical way.”"

“The myth is it will magically fix everything,” he said in a talk at CloudBeat with Matt Marshall (pictured left), founder and editor in chief of VentureBeat. “Orders will start rolling in.”

But the first Salesforce integration wasn’t done right, starting in 2008. Dayeh came in during 2011 to help redo the integration. The cloud-based app wasn’t talking with the core systems. Integration had to happen, and Dayeh learned that “you still have to create a process” to do the integration right.

The problem at Axcient was that sales would receive an order through Salesforce and forward it to the manufacturing operations team. The problem was that  the forwarding happened by printing out the order and passing it on the manufacturing team, which had to re-enter the data.

In this system, if one party upgraded its system, that could break the smooth flow of information from one place to another.

That’s not the way the revamped system works. Now, Axcient has automatically integrated Marketo with Salesforce. That was easy because apps on Salesforce’s AppExchange platform are designed to work together. They may look like web apps, but the data systems have been integrated. The apps talk to each other, said Peter Coffee (pictured center), vice president and head of platform research at Salesforce. That’s important because Axcient is adding customers who want storage at a rate of a petabyte a quarter.

Coffee said that Salesforce has architected its software so that such problems don’t occur. The behind-the-scenes software keeps the communication flow in spite of such differences. Salesforce has learned, he said, that it can’t require its customers to engage in months-long testing processes related to upgrades. Axcient is now using just about every feature that Salesforce offers.

Customers would not regard that as value if we imposed that testing on them,” Coffee said. “You are abstracted from what happens behind the scenes.” Salesforce has kept working on easy integration, so that its service can be implemented in a safe way. That way, a full installation can happen as easily as a prototype test can be done.

The mix of data across platforms doesn’t have to be scary for customers.

“The public cloud is not like a public toilet,” he said. “You put your money in a public bank, but your account is your own.”

Here’s a video of the discussion:

The days of chalkboards and workbooks may soon be a relic of times past. Teachers these days can supplement their curricula with interactive software and proctor tests without making hundreds of paper copies.

While new technology may enhance the learning process for students, it can be challenging for instructors to implement, which is why education startup Clever has raised $3 million to make this process easier.

Clever’s technology integrates data held in Student Information Systems (SIS) into educational software. If students use the internet to complete assignments or execute projects, teachers need this online activity to connect with overall tracking of their performance. This can be time-consuming and confusing for educators not trained in IT, which is where Clever comes in.

Founder Dan Carroll experienced this frustration first hand while working as the director of technology for a school district. He saw that educational software made things more complicated for teachers and set out with his two former Harvard classmates Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia to address this.

“One of the biggest changes in education is blended learning,” said Bosmeny. “There is so much innovation happening in software helping kids learn and boosting test scores, but when software isn’t integrated, data becomes siloed and out of date. We realized there was a data problem to helping schools fully use this software, and by making it faster and easier, we are transforming education.”

Clever works with developers of online learning applications so by the time the software arrives in schools, “it just works.” The information coming from these programs automatically updates student data, so teachers don’t have to. Since founding Clever in April and participated in the Y Combinator accelerator program, Clever has established partnerships with 40 ed tech companies, including DreamBox, Scientific Learning and MasteryConnect. Through these deals, the benefit of this technology reaches 2,000 schools and 650,000 students.

Bosmeny said that going through Y Combinator encouraged the team to iterate their product quickly and often, and to not only attract the attention of top tier investors, but also of influencers in the online learning space. A number of Y Combinator partners personally invested in this $3 million round, as well as SV Angel, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitch Kapor, and Ashton Kutcher. From the education world, John Katzman of the Princeton Review and 2tor, founder of Chegg Aayush Phumbhra, and Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis also provided support.

The funding will go towards growing the scale of the company and the number of partnerships so that one day, Bosmeny said, all education software will plug into Clever.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dropbox just announced a new integration today, and it’s a doozy: Facebook. Starting soon — possibly as early as today — Facebook users can share Dropbox files, pictures, and folders to their friends and contacts in Facebook Groups.

Once you’ve linked your Facebook and Dropbox accounts, you will be able to browse and select files from your Dropbox just as if you were selecting from your own computer and then share them to your group. They’ll immediately show up on your group’s wall, and any updates or changes you make to the documents will automatically be shared to the group as well.

Source: Dropbox

Adding a file from Dropbox to your Facebook group.

This is huge for Dropbox, which in spite of some security missteps has continued to add users at an astounding rate through smart partnerships and bigger, better storage plans.

But I hope they have added plenty of extra storage in anticipation of this integration. Facebook is the mother of all social networks, in the Saddam sense, and if even a fraction of its billion users start using this feature, Dropbox will see a huge influx of new users … and new files.

The feature is rolling out today, and Dropbox says you should see it in Facebook “soon.”

photo credit: ryancr via photopin cc

Twitter is an indispensible communications tool. But how do you save all the good stuff?

For example, what if you want to save the URL of a funny video your friend tweeted or something really nice that someone said to you? Twitter has no easy way to save your favorite tweets, and search doesn’t always work.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo has said that the company would offer a way for you to download all of your tweets, probably before the end of this year, but he didn’t provide any details.

And in the meantime, geek utility If This, Then That (IFTTT) — which used to be great for saving Twitter posts — has been disconnected from Twitter.

For packrats like myself, this is a drag. I don’t need to save every tweet, but I do like to save certain tweets.

Fortunately, I’ve found some workarounds.

Depending on your archiving needs, the tips below might be just the ticket. I can’t guarantee that Twitter will allow these services to keep running. But for now, here are some ways to save your most important tweets elsewhere.

Got other workarounds? Let us know in the comments!

Pinboard

Remember bookmarking site Delicious? Pinboard is just like Delicious was before Yahoo sold it off to a group of people who seemed to have no idea what Delicious was about. It’s a simple, bare-bones site for saving URLs. Usefully, Pinboard lets you link up to three separate Twitter accounts. You can configure it to import anything you favorite, anything you tweet that includes a URL, or both. Pinboard charges a one-time fee (currently $9.89) to sign up.

Diigo

Diigo is a useful tool for saving URLs and annotating them with notes. It’s got a handy Twitter tool, which saves every tweet you mark as a “favorite” as a bookmark in Diigo. You have to sign up for Diigo, but once you do, you can connect Diigo to Twitter to save your favorites. Diigo is free to try, but it costs $20 per year after that. Its new-user signup page appears to be offline Sunday, but it’s up today..

Evernote

Evernote is a handy multiplatform utility for saving notes and URLs of all kinds. Usefully, it integrates with your Twitter account, though it’s less automated than we’d like. To link Evernote to your Twitter account, first follow Evernote’s @MyEN account on Twitter. You’ll get a direct message from MyEN; after you click on it, you can go into Evernote and link it to Twitter. From then on, add @MyEN to anything you tweet in order to have Evernote archive it, or send a direct message to @MyEN.

LinkedIn

You can no longer link Twitter to IFTTT recipes, but IFTTT still supports LinkedIn, and vice versa. That’s handy, because you can use LinkedIn to update your Twitter profile. This means you can have it both ways: You can save your tweets in the service of your choice and still use IFTTT. Say you want to save all your updates to Evernote. First, add the IFTTT LinkedIn channel to your IFTTT account. Set up the recipe to file your LinkedIn updates to Evernote. Then connect your LinkedIn account to your Twitter account (via LinkedIn settings). Finally, start using LinkedIn to post your status updates instead of Twitter. When you do, your status updates will be saved in Evernote, and simultaneously piped over to Twitter.

Flipboard

Flipboard is a handy tool for reading news culled from various public channels or your social network. Although there might be reasons to worry about Flipboard’s relationship with Twitter, for now it works quite nicely with Twitter. That’s handy, because it’s possible to make your Twitter favorites into a Flipboard section. Once you do, it’s easy to retrieve those favorites for later reading via Flipboard, and from there you can save the linked articles into other apps, like Pocket, Instapaper, or Readability.

Gnip

Gnip is a provider of social media data to enterprise application developers, and it recently released something called Historical PowerTrack for Twitter. This lets you download every tweet ever tweeted since Twitter’s launch in 2006. Are you a packrat and a coder? Then you can probably figure out a way to munge through this dataset to get whatever you want. Pricing is not available, but it’s probably not free.

Packratius

I don’t know how I forgot to include Packratius in the first version of this post, as I’ve used it before, and it’s made for exactly the purpose I describe here. Whenever anything you tweet or retweet includes a URL, Packratius will save it for you in the services of your choice: Delicious, Pinboard, Diigo, Instapaper, Pocket, and more. It can also save URLs in @ replies that people direct to you, as well as your favorite. Packratius is free.

Backupify

Backupify is a service that, well, backs up your cloud-based data, including Twitter as well as Facebook, Gmail, Google Drive, and Flickr. The free version of the service will archive up to three online services for you, once a week. For $5 per month it’ll back up every night. This would be a good way to save absolutely everything from your Twitter account. (Thanks for the tip, Rich!)

Photo credit: redjar via photo pin

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Blue Jeans Network, the company that offers super-simple video conferences in the browser, is announcing the first-ever videoconferencing integration with Salesforce.com.

The company, which we covered back in June, was also the first to allow videoconference participants to join conferences originating on legacy videoconferencing equipment simply from a common web browser. Now Salesforce.com clients will be able to initiate or join video conferences without leaving their SalesForce application.

Source: Blue Jeans Network

Blue Jeans’ video conferencing in a browser

Video conferencing is a hot and rapidly-evolving space. Vidyo, the company that supplies the technology for Google+ Hangouts, recently revealed VidyoWay, its solution for seamlessly connecting multiple video endpoints, each with potentially different video conferencing solutions. And industry heavyweights such as Polycom are releasing new products and services to compete with the startups.

Blue Jeans has pinned its competitive differentiation on dead-simple implementation, integration, and use. If you have a web browser, you can use Blue Jeans. That simplicity overlays significant technical complexity, as chief executive Krish Ramakrishnan alluded to in a statement:

“We are the first and only company in the world today that can conduct a single video meeting using endpoints as disparate as Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize, Skype, Microsoft Lync, Google, and even a browser.”

Blue Jeans said it will demonstrate the new technology at DreamForce 2012, the annual Salesforce.com conference.

photo credit: FaceMePLS via photo pin cc

For online shoppers, getting your neatly packaged goods on time is an absolute necessity. Once you’ve added an item to your shopping cart, you want to feel it, hold it, and try it on. Stat.

To give retailers a competitive edge, Shopify announced a partnership today that promises to cut shipping time anywhere from a half to a third. Shopify, a website used by thousands of retailers to build and launch their online store, is integrating with ShipStation, a web-based shipping solution.

“This partnership not only introduces ShipStation to a whole new set of retailers looking for a better shipping solution, but it also offers a new, online retailing option to our current customers,” said Byron Wier, cofounder of ShipStation.

Austin, TX-based ShipStation specializes in order import, batch label creation and returns management software. The startup has also integrated with e-commerce giants, like eBay and Amazon, and processes over 1 million shipping labels each month for over 2,000 online retail stores.

This announcement is one of a recent spate of integrations for Shopify. The company, which competes with Magento and BigCommerce, also teamed up with Stitch Labs, a cloud-based solution for small and medium sized business to manage inventory and orders.

Retailers, this is not a free service. ShipStation is offering a 30 day trial, but after that, it will set you back anywhere from $25 to $145 per month depending on the volume of orders.

Image via Shutterstock

Yammer has teamed up with sentiment analysis startup Kanjoya to track office banter and gain deep insight into how employees are feeling at work.

Kanjoya’s analytics dashboard retrieves data from your company’s Yammer network to gauge emotions across departments like sales, marketing, and HR. Individuals won’t be tracked and profiled, as the algorithm will aggregate and compare conversations between groups.

The company claims to use machine learning processing to understand varied and complex emotional signals. Kanjoya’s founder, Armen Berjikly, told me the algorithm works with 70 percent accuracy in detecting 80 emotional responses, such as “surprised,” “frustrated,” or “happy.” He said this is on par with any group of colleagues or friends, who, like machines, often misunderstand complex emotions.

Through this partnership, Yammer users can access a word cloud to view the trending company-wide conversations.

For all you gossip-mongers, the new tool will also showcase the most praised and liked individuals in the office. Yammer’s VP of business development, An Le, told me this helps companies locate “rising stars” in departments, who are asking the tough questions and gaining both influence and authority.

Le offered an example of a junior engineer at a global research company in Perth, Australia, who challenged his company’s status quo on Yammer. “He became the second most followed person behind the CEO,” she said. “That’s the type of conversation we need to understand and track.”

Le told me that Yammer has been searching for over a year to integrate with a sentiment analysis tool to capture emotion across the enterprise.

“Kanjoya offered us a way to understand not just the number of “likes” or volume of conversations, but drive into natural language processing and 80 layers of emotion,” she explained.

Kanjoya claims to have a different approach than its major competitors, Lexalytics and Crimson Hexagon. It began as a social networking site — Experience Project – where users expressed a broad range of emotions. Berjikly leveraged this data set, primarily unstructured data like text, to build an algorithm to track both sentiment (positive, negative, and neutral signals) and emotion.

It’s more reliable than a survey, but sentiment analysis is a notoriously tough nut to crack. The most enduring problem is that it’s difficult for an algorithm to tell the difference between a positive and neutral comment. Consider this ambiguous statement: “The parking lot is located nearby.” Berjikly told me that the company grappled with this problem, and responded by discounting these types of comments.

Another obstacle is that some emotions have a stronger signal than others. It might be an over-indulgence in the TV show “The Office” on my part, but I’d be surprised if any office in America doesn’t engage in a little, healthy sarcasm. Berjikly admits this is a problem, but claims the algorithm gets better at detecting an organization’s nuances over time.

It may seem a bit invasive, but the technology has proven useful in the beta phase for specific use-cases. For instance, if an HR manager decides to switch the company’s health provider, she can view a dashboard to gauge the response and react accordingly.

The new tool is available to Yammer users today, who can try it for 30 days for free before paying an additional fee. Le would not disclose pricing but told me the fee is negotiated on a company-by-company basis.

Water cooler image via Shutterstock

In fact, the top five companies doubled the revenue growth of the average company in the index. For the 500 companies in the index, the average revenue growth since 2010 was 20.4 percent. But the top five companies averaged a blistering 45 percent revenue growth.

And companies that increased their Echo Rank most over just the past two months saw year-over-year revenue growth of almost 30 percent.

“Our rankings show that the companies investing in social and particularly social commerce are seeing the largest gains in revenues,” says Echo System chief executive Lance Neuhauser.

According to the Echo Rank index, the top five companies turning social into sales are:

1. FansEdge (sports fan branded products)
2. Barney’s New York (designer clothing)
3. Turn5 (runs AmericanMuscle.com, a car parts site)
4. GameStop (world’s largest gamer store)
5. Fossil (watches, handbags, fashion accessories)

Echo Rank tracks 500 e-commerce companies across various social indicators such as user engagement, social integration, and site performance. Those include factors as diverse as follower/fan count, likes and retweeets, integration of social into a company’s site and services, and how effective a website is at converting shoppers into buyers.

Source: The Echo System

A sample ranking for Barney’s New York

It appears that tight social integration can even trump site conversion performance, since Turn5, coming in at number three, has a site performance score of only seven. But its social score, which is a measure of how well it engages fans online, is a perfect 100.

Bass Pro fishing and sporting good retailer, 1-800-Flowers, and lingerie legend Frederick’s of Hollywood round out the top ten.

Notable fails in the top 500 include Aeropostale at #491, NASCAR.com at 428, and Best Buy at #215.

And the full top 10:

Image credit: Allies Interactive Services Pvt. Ltd./ShutterStock

I’ve been using WordPress blogging software since before it was WordPress. Seriously.

Before there was WordPress there was b2/cafelog, around 2001 (if you remember that, you’re among the proud and the few). In 2003, Matt Mullenweg released WordPress, which today has grown from a simple piece of blogging software to the most popular choice for a content management system on the planet.

Facebook, you all know.

Integrating Facebook and WordPress has always been a little tricky. Over a thousand of the 19,812 plugins currently available for WordPress enable some form of connection with Facebook. Enterprising bloggers who wanted to be social would find one, download and install it, fiddle with Facebook connection settings, and pray. From personal experience I can tell you that not all plugins worked, and some failed in spectacular blog-up-your-blog fashion.

So an actual plugin from Facebook itself is a big deal.

What the Facebook for WordPress plugin does is cross-post content published on your blog to your Facebook timeline or Page. And, just like typing in a friend’s name in a Facebook status update, if you mention a friend by their Facebook name it will automatically put the post on your friend’s timeline as well.

This is a simple, clean plugin that does what most WordPress users need.

In addition, Facebook announced plugins that are now available as WordPress widgets — small, moveable components that WordPress bloggers can position wherever they want. The widgets include an activity feed, which shows your visitors what their friends are doing on your site, recommendations for the best pages and posts on your blog, a comments box, and customizable like, subscribe, and send buttons.

The new features are available on WordPress.com blogs, which see 600 million visitors a month, and on personally hosted blogs.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Google surprised a lot of people last fall when it announced that it was buying restaurant ratings company Zagat. Now, Google is finally making some moves with the buy via Google+ Local, an overhaul of Google’s local search.

With the revamp, Zagat reviews are now a key part of Google+ Local. The new local search adds restaurant ratings to Google Search, Maps, and as a new tab in Google+. Google will also be updating its Google Maps app for Android and iOS to add in new Google+ Local results.

As for the design, you’ll notice that Google’s five-star reviews are gone and replaced with Zagat’s 30-point scale. On the Google+ side, the Zagat reviews are joined by personal recommendations of connected Google+ users, which adds another layer of relevancy to search results and reviews. Clearly, Google is still serious about integrating all of its services into one cohesive whole.

All in all, it appears that Zagat is finally justifying the $151 million that Google paid for it. At the time of the acquisition, Google said that the Zagat reviews would become a cornerstone of its local offerings. Judging by the recent shifts and changes, its clear that that’s still true.

You can see a video detailing Google+ Local below:

Skype, which Microsoft acquired in June, technically can’t start any integration until terms of the company’s sale are approved by European regulators. The company did, however, share a road map for what consumers can expect to see in the future.

While Skype currently produces application support for both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android devices, the company plans to offer something unique when it’s brought to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, according to the report. As a division of Microsoft, Skype will be able to gain much deeper integration that can’t be achieved on either iOS or Android. This is mainly due to restrictions on those devices that don’t allow third-party applications to access the mobile phone’s video processor or address book information.

Skype’s vice president and general manager of products Neil Stevens told Fortune that he wants to see Skype move beyond just an application when it hits Windows Phones — with integration similar to Apple’s treatment of the Safari web browser or Skype’s upcoming video service with Facebook.

Consumers are likely to see a greater emphasis on Skype’s partnership with Facebook, which adds a video chat function to Facebook. Users will be able to make outbound calls to landlines and cellphones from within Facebook to Skype and vice versa. Only a small portion of Facebook’s total global users currently have access, but a larger roll out should occur in the next few weeks, according to the report.

Skype was unavailable for comment about its future integration plans.

The company is forging ahead with plans to add a social layer to Gmail by adding integration with its new social service, Google+, according to Gmail engineering manager Mark Striebeck.

In a public message via Google+, Striebeck asked users for responses to the following three questions:

• What email features would make it easier to interact with Google+?
• How could we integrate Google+ features into Gmail?
• How can we integrate social concepts in Gmail to make the email experience itself better?

Striebeck is using Google+’s Hangouts video chat feature to conduct six focus-group-like meetings for the purpose of brainstorming. Only 50 lucky people will get to participate in the 15-minute-long Hangout sessions, which will happen tomorrow from 3 -5 p.m. PST.

Striebeck also set up a survey form for users to submit ideas on Google+/Gmail integration after an overwhelming number of requests to join the Hangout sessions. However, plenty of people left their suggestions in the comment section of Striebeck’s note.

“I would love to see a cross-notifications feature integrated into Google+ for Gmail — i.e., when I’m in Gmail, I can see G+ notifications in the upper right. But I’d like to be able to ‘sit’ in G+ (which I’m more likely to have open than Gmail now because of the real-time feed) and see new mail notifications for Gmail in the toolbar,” wrote Caryn Vainio.

Google+ user Steve Woods said he wants to avoid using two separate Google+ accounts for his work-based Gmail account and his personal Gmail account. ”It would be nice to be able to simply add a work-based Gmail address (or any other number of my personal or work Gmail addresses for that matter) to this G+ account, then tie those Gmails to a Circle(s) for work- or other- based content management,” Woods wrote.

“The disconnect between Contacts, Contact Groups, and Circles seems like it would need to be addressed for proper integration. I’d like to at least have the option of making my G+ and Gmail contact lists one unified list,” wrote Rob Nelson.

And while I saw several comments asking for better management of Gmail contacts with Google+ Circles, just as many people were nervous about that level of integration.

Scanning through the comment section on Striebeck’s note revealed many statements asking Google to take great care in regards to separating the privacy of email with the openness of Google+. That’s something the company didn’t do with its first attempt at adding a social layer to Gmail, Google Buzz. The company’s launch of Buzz within Gmail caused privacy concerns for many of its users –  resulting in a class action lawsuit.

“One of the single biggest EPIC failures of Buzz was the nearly forced integration of a Google social product and that of a service that some people pay for. I trust you will find a way to seamlessly integrate these two products, but be warned: If I (and likely millions of others who share my perspective) am unable to keep both products completely isolated from one another, solely at my own discretion, it may be the reason I stop using either one,” wrote Google+ user Brian Kelley in a comment.

Clearly, the company has learned from past mistakes by trying to include its users in the Google+/Gmail integration process. Another screw up could cause people to stop using Gmail entirely.

Yet, that’s exactly what happened when people tried to link their Hulu accounts with their Facebook profile via Facebook Connect. Connect is a service that lets Facebook users log into third-party services using their Facebook account information.

Hulu said shortly after launching its Facebook Connect feature Friday that it noticed a small number of users were seeing someone else’s account information upon logging in to the site. That means they saw someone else’s queue (playlist) of videos, subscriptions and friends. The company confirmed that 50 of its users were affected by this flaw, which could have exposed their profile data. Highly sensitive information such as account passwords or credit card numbers were not compromised as a result of the bug, the company said.

But the company’s statement conflicts with the experience documented by Audio Video Revolution’s Mike Flacy, who gained access to Hulu employee Thomas Moore’s account due to the privacy flaw.

After logging in to Moore’s account, Flacy writes:

…I was able to access his [Moore's] street address, financial information (last 4 digits of his CC with expiration date), device management, email address and password.  I know that Thomas has just finished watching episodes of Modern Family, Suits, Burn Notice and The Guild.  If I was a jerk, I could cancel his Hulu Plus account, turn off all his devices and change his email / password.  If I was a devious thief, I could slip my device onto his account and get some free Hulu Plus until he noticed. Thank goodness for Thomas, I’m not. 

As further proof of his experience, Flacy provided several screenshots of the privacy flaw in action within his post.

“We’re still drilling down on the precise nature of the issue, but we know that it was a coding and configuration error on Hulu’s side, and not the result of hacking, or other third-party actions, or a vulnerability in Facebook Connect,” wrote Hulu’s Vice President of Platform Technology Richard Tom on the company’s blog.

Tom said the company is being extra cautious going forward. All the integration of Facebook Connect on Hulu has been disabled, and all users are required to login directly to the site using their Hulu account information instead of a Facebook ID. Also, all privacy settings have been set to the maximum restrictive level by default for anyone who logged into a Hulu account using Facebook.

“Once we are certain that the issue has been fully addressed, we will re-launch our Facebook Connect program,” Tom said. “We apologize to any affected users, and we intend to do everything we can to make it right and avoid similar issues in the future.”

It’s a shame that Hulu ran into such a huge security compromising bug, because at least one of the new features enabled through Facebook Connect was exactly as the company described it: “first-of-its-kind…”

The feature allows Hulu users to comment on a specific moment within a video. Both the comment and the relevant portion of the video can be shared on your Facebook profile by clicking a button on the video player’s page. Other video services like Vimeo and YouTube have similar commenting features, but neither has done it quite like Hulu does with its social integration.

Hulu said it won’t roll out Facebook Connect integration to the site again until the company can ensure that breaches of privacy won’t occur in the future. But since that could take a while, I’ve embedded a screenshot of the new commenting feature below.

Via Gigaom

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sprint subscribers who chose to integrate their service with a Google Voice phone number may discover a higher bill this month caused by overage fees.

The overage is due to a glitch in the integration process treats the Google Voice phone number as if it’s from an outside carrier, according to Google Voice Senior Product Manager Vincent Paquet, who posted the information on the official support forum.

Sprint customers who rely on free mobile-to-mobile minutes, such as family plans, will be hit hardest. A few long conversations between family members could result in eating up lots of anytime minutes for everyone on the plan — especially if more than one person is using the Google Voice phone number instead of their original Sprint number.

Customers who chose to use their original Sprint phone number as their Google Voice number won’t have this problem, but those who are seeing higher bills and want to switch back to their Sprint number may run into more problems than they fix.

As we reported days after Sprint launched the option to integrate with Google Voice, there is a plethora of  problems being reported by Sprint subscribers that include losing voice call functionality, security breaches and yes, overage charges. Based on customer discussions in the support forums on both the Sprint and Google side, it appears that the only customers affected are those who altered the phone number used for Google Voice.

So, for Sprint subscribers who bravely plan to integrating with Google Voice despite the large number of documented problems, using the Sprint phone number seems to be least problematic option.

Paquet, who was interviewed by CNET about Google Voice integration issues, indicates that most of the problemshave to be fixed on the Sprint side since Google doesn’t have access to investigate in many cases.

Paquet declined to comment on whether Google Voice integration would happen on other carriers. But, if AT&T or Verizon are in discussions to add the feature, hopefully they are taking notes to avoid the complications Sprint is experiencing.

[via ZDnet]