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Cisco Grows Offerings in 2007

Last month Cisco acquired Navini Networks, a company that had made its name in the WiMax field with installs on 6 continents according to their old site. (I guess there is no commercial need for WiMax on Antarctica?) Cisco has been quietly buying and re-branding technology companies for a long time now. In 2007 I saw a few of note that might show where the networking Goliath is headed.

FiveAcross, acquired in February of 2007, is a company that developed social networking software for the corporate environment. Its Community Builder was a tool that would allow a Coke or maybe the NFL to build a social community around the brand; think MySpace for the company.

I can see Cisco and other Internet giants moving ever closer to the user base. Why did Fox value MySpace at $580 million? Simple answer: MySpace has people. True, they had the software that the people were using to build all of the gaudy looking MySpace pages, but it was the users that Fox really wanted, not the software they built the platform on; and that is the trend I see here, Internet old guard seeking a real user-base.

Cisco has done a very good job becoming a ubiquitous commodity on one front that the common internet users understands, VoIP phones on our favorite television show. You see them on 24, they were on West Wing and many other shows where they either highlight technology or need to show you corporate America. My only real gripe here is that the Hollywood types slap a Cisco IP phone on a desk and then dont know how to set it up; so you end up seeing this great tool sitting there with a blank screen. Sad really.

Once Cisco offers some good tools to provide content streams to the IP phones it will be a great tool. At my last company we wrote our own web pages to place a little content on the screens, but once some widget makers get the idea and start churning out canned content for this market Cisco will reap the rewards. (just my two cents.)

Interesting Site of the Day: Inkling Markets is a site that allows anyone to pose a question and then let the viewers on the site answer. Sounds simple, and it is, but they have done a great job packaging it in a way that makes a lot of sense. Each user starts with $5000 worth of capital to make purchase of shares, in other words, you have some play money to make some more play money. Questions range from political to sports to corporate, all of them It is also quite addictive.

You can see in this included widget that bloggers or website owners can incorporate real-time outcomes on their site.

I sold by the way, I don’t see this merger until 2009 or after. Apple is too proud and Google is too confident.

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