Here’s an interesting read for you corporate Web 2.0 enthusiasts: according to a report last week by Forrester Research, “Enterprise 2.0” will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013 and social networking tools will garner the bulk of the money. I read about this first at the ZDNet blog, which includes some fairly smart analysis of the stats to boot. Forrester defines “Enterprise 2.0” as follows:“In Forrester’s view, the key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users, and the ultimate goal is to use technology like Ajax, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, and other networks such as Social Computing, the Information Workplace, and collective intelligence.” Interestingly, their stats showed that smaller enterprises are generally more reticent to jump into Web 2.0 projects in the near future than bigger corporations – a surprise to me and the ZDNet bloggers Larry Dignan and Jason Perlow both.
Another interesting takeaway: social networking leads the pack among valuable applications, followed closely by mashups (now THAT’s interesting, as an application we haven’t seen much of yet in the investor space), with podcasts and widgets pulling up the rear. Even so, spending forecasts for these modest areas are still impressive: $273 million estimated will be spent on podcasting endeavors by 2013.
What about you guys? Obviously lots of you are getting into Web 2.0 for more than just socializing if you’re involved in the TK investing community. But I’m curious if any of you are using wikis or other collaborative media in your day jobs, or anywhere else?
We use an internal wiki here, and have since our inception back in 2005, for all kinds of things, including the internal compliance-approval tracking for blog posts like this. How about you? Anyone? ;)
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