Earlier this year, European IT services giant Atos Origin declared its intentions to completely phase email out of their internal operations within the next three years. This perhaps the most compelling case to date that suggests the declining necessity of email in the enterprise. While it’s certainly premature to declare email — which turned 40 years old in 2011 — “dead” as a technology, it’s fair to acknowledge that a new generation of communication tools is gaining traction as a more effective means of communication for the enterprise.

Email is without a doubt the most tried and true technology for both enterprise and personal communication, but it’s not without its shortcomings. Specifically, Atos CEO Thierry Breton cited email’s spam-like nature as one of the biggest contributors to “information  pollution” that’s bogging down management. His goal is for Atos — which has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide — to be a “zero-email company” within the next three years. In place of email, Breton says that Atos will increasingly encourage its employees to collaborate on instant messaging and social networking platforms.

This marks the first time an organization of this size has made such a definitive statement on email, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. In truth, the gradual shift from email to messaging and social networking platforms began some years ago, but it’s only recently that this phenomenon has penetrated the enterprise from the consumer side.

Over the past several years, the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken a lot of the conversations that once occurred on email to other channels on the consumer side. While email is still a central repository for tracking updates from various networking sites, it has become decidedly less useful for interacting with friends and colleagues on a daily basis compared to mediums like instant messaging and streaming content feeds.

As is often the case, the consumer side embraced these platforms well in advance of the enterprise. Instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter have all been in use for years for personal computing purposes. As the “internet generation” has come of age, entrepreneurs have increasingly put effort behind enterprise-friendly communication and automation tools. The rapid rise of platforms like Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter - which are exclusively geared towards the enterprise — suggest the larger rise of the “social enterprise.”

The social enterprise refers to a premium on enhanced collaboration and real-time communication in the name of greater organizational efficiency. As such, there’s no single be-all, end-all tool that will ultimately replace email. Rather, a suite of complementary tools are gradually emerging as more effective mediums for enterprise collaboration.

Some other noteworthy technologies that are emerging in place of email include:

• Process automation tools: Automating processes via business process management (BPM) tools enables automated responses and actions via automated emails, instant messages, etc. that prompted actionable messages (I.e., a “yes/no” button). This can eliminate the tedious back-and-forth associated with corporate functions like employee on-boarding/off-boarding, invoicing and employee requests. BPM has seen a spike in interest in recent years, with mega-vendors like Oracle and IBM  putting more effort into their BPM offerings, and smaller vendors like BonitaSoft (my company), Intalio and BizAgi also offering BPM suites.
• Enterprise portals: While enterprise portals have existed for some time, they’ve recently begun integrating more social features to increase collaboration between employees — often via real-time, streaming feeds with more accessible user interfaces. More and more, these portals are including plug-ins for other features like process automation and instant messaging to create a wider social intranet in which employees can collaborate. eXo and Liferay are two examples of enterprise portal vendors that have successfully incorporated a social aspect into their respective offerings.
• Semantic web technologies: This is a still-evolving area that, while it has yet to make a significant mark in the enterprise, is poised to emerge as a critical technology in the near future. As organizations continue to struggle to manage the massive volumes of unstructured data generated by internal communication, it’s important to have tools capable of properly sorting and analyzing the information it generates. Examples of this can be seen today from the likes of Microsoft (Powerset/Bing), Apple (Siri/Apple 4S) and Google (FreeBase), among others.

This is not to say that email is not still a necessary component of enterprise communication; it’s still a vital cog for many core organizational processes. However, with the rise of tools such as those mentioned above, it’s undoubtedly seeing a decline in overall  usage — particularly in terms of internal collaboration. Atos’ decision to phase out email is perhaps the most ringing endorsement yet for the notion that email is being gradually phased out of the enterprise, and it will be interesting to see how many other large scale organizations will follow in its footsteps over the next several years as collaborative technologies continue to evolve.

Miguel Valdés Faura is the CEO and co-founder of BonitaSoft, a France-based company that produces business process management (BPM) software and provides commercial services and support for the open source Bonita project, of which he is also co-founder. Follow Miguel on Twitter @MiguelValdes.

For more information about the future of collaboration tools, check out GigaOM’s Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

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Imagine watching professional football religiously all year long. Then imagine that it’s finally time for the Super Bowl, and, suddenly, whoever is in charge of the NFL announces that some team you forgot even existed is playing, because it won a whole other football season that was happening on the Internet. Ridiculous, right? Well, that’s what’s going on with Top Chef this season.

This week, Bravo.com premiered the first episode of Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen, an online-only series in which two chefs, eliminated from the TV show, compete head-to-head in one final challenge. The winning chef each week goes on to cook against the next eliminated chef; this proceeds until the finale, when the remaining chef will be able to rejoin the competition.

Last Chance Kitchen is fine, on a creative level — it’s a well-paced and professional package that adheres closely to the show’s format (overly dramatic music stings and all). But as a case study in integrating web content into a pre-established series, it’s a potential disaster, largely because of its distribution.

I will not make fun of the fact that the Bravo website, in lieu of embeddable video, is offering a widget to distribute Last Chance Kitchen — because I am kind, and also because the series is thankfully also available on Hulu.

But while super-fans may already be subscribed to Top Chef on Hulu or visiting Bravo.com on a daily basis, for most of the show’s 1.6 million viewers, the only way they’ll remember that Last Chance Kitchen exists is if the show uses precious ad minutes to nag them into going online and watching. As the Los Angeles Times’s John Horn complained, “you have to get up from the TV, start up your laptop and (of all the indignities!) be forced to watch the commercials.”

If Last Chance Kitchen were Hulu Plus and available on phones, tablets or other connected devices, that would be a significant improvement. Unfortunately, it’s note. In fact, Hulu’s note about Bravo programming is one of the more peculiarly-worded ones I’ve seen: “Hulu can offer a select number of full-length episodes from Bravo’s lineup each calendar month. The episodes featured and when they are posted are at Bravo’s discretion.” In short: Don’t blame us. It’s Bravo that’s being stingy.

Last Chance Kitchen also proves problematic when you consider how it changes the competition. Let’s say the winner of this first Last Chance Kitchen (no spoilers) goes on to dominate each subsequent episode — competing against chefs who were eliminated later and are thus, by the logic of the show, better chefs. While winning 12 cook-offs against arguably more talented cooks is an impressive feat, it’s an entirely different experience than the challenges the actual cheftestants will be going through — challenges meant in theory to evaluate each chef’s skill in handling a variety of situations. And so when the winner of Last Chance Kitchen re-enters the competition after not having been on television for potentially weeks, he or she will be altering the narrative of the show.

Top Chef has been nominated for Emmys for its efforts to integrate the web and TV in the past — some of the work they’ve done with online polling and Twitter is groundbreaking. In theory, this is what convergence culture creates: the blurring of lines between television and web to tell a story richer than the sum of its parts. But Last Chance Kitchen may well be a major misstep for the show.

That’s because, when creating an experience on multiple platforms, you either have to make sure that each element can be enjoyed separately with no consequences, or make sure that all elements of the experience are easily accessible. For Last Chance Kitchen, neither of these things is true.

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Free Wallpaper

Getting a wallpaper on your computer is something that for many people is important and that is why you will always find yourself, like many users out there, looking for cool wallpapers on the web in order to beautify your computer’s screen. There are thus a lot of sources from where you could get that which you need in order to beautify the screen of your computer. There are a lot of Free Wallpapers out there and most of the times, you will never have to pay anything for them.

Yet if you want something better and something that will let you in on the best quality when it comes to desktop wallpapers, you will also try at least once in your life to go with websites that ask you for money for their services instead of those sites that offers a free wallpaper. You will find the wallpapers that you need in every resolution, so you will be able to use it on man devices and screens.

For instance, you see that there are a lot of people that have widescreen monitors and even though they have become the new standard, there are still a lot of individuals that have normal 4:3 monitors. For them, finding good wallpapers is something that they have to cope with on a daily basis. The people that don’t have such monitors yet either don’t have the cash for one or they really don’t like the new standard, which I agree on.

As such, on the specialized websites, you will also be able to find Mobile Wallpaper for your phone or mobile computer. Even though you will have to pay, the quality you get to benefit from will surpass that of the free of charge wallpapers. As such, you will not only be let in on wallpapers that look amazing, but also you will get them in any resolution you need them to be in.

Maybe you don’t really like to go with the websites that will ask you for money in return for the wallpapers they offer you. Yet in the majority of cases, if you are not a diehard when it comes to wallpapers, you could just resort to the free websites.

On the websites that you will be required to pay money on, you will see that the quality of the wallpapers is much higher than those of the free sites. So when you will finally get to have a new wallpaper on your computer, your PC will look pretty much amazing and you could say that it would get a new personality.

It took months for the world to pick up on the plight of Amina Arraf, a lesbian blogger from Damascus who challenged the authorities — and her readers — to understand the troubles of Syria’s population. Her end, however, was decidedly swift.

After a series questions and investigations into her identity, it rapidly emerged that the whole thing was a hoax. In a posting published a short while ago, “Amina” was revealed to be a fictional character — the work of a Scottish educator, Tom MacMaster, who claimed that he had created the character in order to publicize the situation in Syria:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

The truth is, however, that his confession came only after the net had already closed in, thanks to a series of links back to MacMaster and his wife, American campaigner Britta Froelicher. There had already been a number of skeptics by the time the first shoe really dropped, when the blog carried news of Arraf’s disappearance and arrest. The sudden flurry of media activity that followed led to the revelation that the photo of “Amina” was actually Jelena Lecic, a Croatian woman living in London. Alarm bells started ringing, though obviously there were plenty of reasons why Arraf might use a fake photograph (as well as, possibly, an obscured identity, though she claimed at times it was her real name).

But after a collective effort from a number of individuals, notably NPR’s Andy Carvin, San Francisco developer Liz Henry and Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, the truth came out. It also emerged that MacMaster and his wife were a pair of seasoned pro-Palestinian campaigners based largely in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The reaction so far has been a mixture of relief — that Amina was not really imprisoned after all — and anger; anger not only at being duped, but also because the hoax potentially endangers the lives and stories of real Syrians trying to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Jillian York, for example, who has written eloquently about her feelings on the situation, says she is ”furious”.

So what does this hoax tell us? What will it mean?

There will likely be some social and political repercussions. Actual members of Syria’s gay communities were concerned that they would be targeted by the authorities since the blog (and therefore their repressive tactics) had become so widely discussed. That doesn’t sit well with MacMaster’s statement that he does not believe he’s harmed anyone. At the same time, the political stance of both MacMaster and Froelicher will inevitably allow some political sites to paint the whole enterprise (and by association, concern for Syrians) as some anti-Israeli conspiracy.

And then, of course, there will be the inevitable hand-wringing. How did readers get fooled so easily? Why did nobody find this out before? How did news organizations get sucked in?

It’s likely that some will blame this on the mainstream media’s failure to out Arraf. Numerous outlets covered her story: CNN quoted her in an article and the Guardian also ran an interview with her. How could they not know? Was there a failure of process?

There have been plenty of high-profile failures in the news business over the years, from the Hitler Diaries to the Balloon Boy hoax. News organizations are looking for credible, compelling stories and Arraf’s was too interesting to ignore. The blog had been online for some years, telling a consistent story. Of course, confirming her identity was hard, but she conducted long conversations with people over IM and Skype and had credible reasons for staying a little under the radar (NPR’s Carvin asked the Guardian about their interview and it turned out it did not happen in person). This was a failure, obviously, since the hoax wasn’t spotted — but right now, it’s not clear how serious that failure was.

At the same time, some will likely suggest that it’s the online world’s fault for allowing her story to spread so far and so fast. Without the instant pass-it-along-and-don’t-check-the-facts nature of a service like Twitter, without the anyone-can-do-it nature of blogging, would we even be in this situation? Despite the fact that Twitter, blogging and the rest helped solve this puzzle, there’s not much to crow about. The online world has more than its share of hoaxes, and the fake blogger routine has been around for a long time.

I remember writing a story more than 10 years ago about a blogger called Kaycee Nicole, who purported to be an American teenager documenting her fight against leukaemia. She gained a significant following in the run-up to her death in 2001 — at which point, after some skeptics decided to investigate, it turned out to be a hoax. The culprit, a Debbie Swenson, had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the fantasy going: online chats, photos, phone calls and so on. She received lots of good will and plenty of gifts from well-wishers — so much so, that the FBI ended up looking into the case over fraud allegations. Online hoaxes of this sort have been going on for years and will continue as long as people are trying to deceive the audience.

The truth is, whether it’s a fictional character like Amina Arraf or faked material like Hitler’s diaries or simply a sad fantasy like Kaycee Nicole, moments like this will always exist as long as there are rules for somebody to work around.

Attention is an incredible, addictive thing, and verification can sometimes be difficult. As long as some people want to deliberately deceive you, for whatever reason, and there are people who want to believe, then hoaxes will be hard to eradicate.

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In case you are an adult and have the want to find out how you can play piano, some erroneous beliefs might be holding you back from pursuing this aim. Maybe you’ve got heard it said that only younger men and women can effortlessly find out piano. This is, naturally, not correct in any way, as piano is an instrument that may be discovered and mastered by adults at the same time.

Studying piano as an adult provides you with far more manage as far as deciding how or exactly where your piano-learning path will go. Typically, children who take piano lessons have their mother and father choose for them what designs of piano they want to find out at first, but adults have far more freedom to choose to go with classical, jazz, pop, or other designs.

When you have no understanding of piano whatsoever, you’ll find also further resources you can use apart from a individual piano instructor. The world wide web has many sites providing each free of charge and paid piano guidelines and courses for adults. A piano lessons DVD also can be beneficial to people that have far more hectic schedules and could have difficulty arranging a schedule having a piano teacher during the week.

One particular thing you must don’t forget as an adult studying piano would be to really feel like a student. Regardless of whether your piano instructor is older or younger than you, you will need to be open to find out, to be instructed and corrected, and to listen to what the instructor has to say.

Also, be committed to truly practicing daily, even when you can only set aside several minutes of the time on a daily basis. Incorporate your piano practice into your daily habits. The far more you practice, the more rapidly you’ll progress. Be focused on the lessons at the same time. When you have at the least an hour per day for piano lessons and practice, try to forget every thing else that you worry about for the duration of that hour. This frees your mind and makes it far more receptive towards the skills you might be studying, but this also can serve as an hour of relaxation in your aspect.

Piano could be a quite rewarding hobby for adults, along with a likelihood to show your creativity or release emotions constructively. In case you choose to find out piano, whether or not by way of a piano instructor, a find out piano DVD, or other programs, be prepared to set aside every thing else for several moments daily to pursuing a brand new skill that may make you a far more well-rounded individual.

Hardware drivers can be considered to be the brains behind the programs in your PC. Such program (hardware driver software) is the program that will check your drivers. Doing so, it will try to find out any failed installations, or also corrupt driver files that could result to software (and hardware) not working at correctly, and in sync, with each others. Here Driver Download you will read more about computer drivers.

To keep your hardware up to date on your computer is important if you want to keep it working rightly. According to your OS, there will be many ways to update your driver files. With the help of a driver software, you will find out it’s the easiest way to keep a healthy and fully working PC. Check here Avanquest Driver Genius Review to read more about Driver Genius.

Once you install driver software it is easy to locate driver issues, updates, and repair instances of driver issues. Without proper updates to your drivers your computer will not work at it’s optimum performance. Most usual problems are with modems, printers, routers, besides any syncing devices like smart phones. It is also important to note that ‘auto’ updates that are recommended by your computer’s operating system often do not reflect the driver settings.

Any person using their PC system on a daily basis should know that driver software is a great tool. For both your hardware and software updates, and due to the constant technological changes, it is very important to remain updated. Below are some common errors related to hardware driver issues:

Crashing and or freezing of the entire computer.
No possibility to print. Neither to get connected to a wireless or wired printer.
Unable to ‘see’ plug and play devices such as web cams, external drives, keyboards and pointing devices.
Network adapters problems. Those connecting you to the Web ( like a modem)

Such problems are just some of the errors you can get because of outdated, corrupt, or even missing driver files. These can be troubleshooted through the control panel of the operating system on your computer, or by using a driver software that is installed on your machine.