Collaboration applications are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise space. Startup Huddle.net has been steadily accumulating innovative features to its business-friendly collaboration platform and quickly adding big name companies, including Samsung and Panasonic, as clients. Huddle is a network of secure online workspaces where you can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. Today, Huddle is adding several more useful features to its platform—web conferencing, integration with Microsoft Office, and a much-awaited iPhone app.

Huddle’s web conferencing feature, which is similar to web-ex, lets users set up meetings, schedule recurring events, and share their desktop and content with other members of their workspace. Huddle has also sent up a partnership with InterCall, one of the world’s largest conference call providers, to handle phone conferencing. Huddle’s web conferencing tool is integrated with Outlook or Google calendar and users receive free conferencing minutes as a part of their monthly package and can also access low-cost international service plans.

Huddle is also letting Microsoft office users seamlessly move between the productivity suite and the collaboration platform by launching a Microsoft Office plug-in that lets you save desktop files to Huddle save their desktop files directly into Huddle’s cloud-based storage, view and edit files, add new versions, request approvals and send notifications without opening a browser window. You’ll be able to access any edited Word documents that you’ve tweaked in the desktop app directly from Huddle. And this feature is enhanced by Huddle’s previous ability to use a Zoho-powered editor to work on Word and Excel files together directly in the browser. As a Microsoft BizSpark partner (we just announced Yammer’s BizSpark news a few weeks ago), Huddle is going to be developing a plug-in for SharePoint and and other Microsoft products in the near future. Currently, the MS Office plug-in works for the 2007 version but will be retrofitted to work with Microsoft Office 2010 next year.

There was some speculation earlier this month about the fact that Huddle doesn’t have a mobile presence. But Huddle’s new iPhone app lets users have full access to document sharing, project tasks, discussions and whiteboards, as well as a complete view of the user’s personalized dashboard. Huddle can be also accessed on other cell phones by using third party applications such as Clustr.

Huddle has also developed partnerships and integrations with LinkedIn and Ning to be included as apps on both social network. And the startup has a similar deal with Facebook, which allows you full access to all of Huddle’s tools within the social network.

And Huddle is affordable—there’s a free, ad-supported version available from the Huddle web site (which includes 1 workspace and 1GB of storage); three premium levels (which have increased workspace and storage) and an enterprise version with multiple managers, customization, advanced security, training, and increased support services. And Huddle allows for unlimited numbers of users for each account.

Andy McLoughlin, Huddle’s co-founder and director of strategic development, tells methat while 55 percent of Huddle’s users (McLoughlin says total users amount in the “Hundreds of thousands”) are based in the U.S., Huddle is making a big play for the U.S. in the coming year, opening up offices in San Francisco and other areas. Considering that many of Huddle’s big-name clients are based in the U.S. such as Edelman and Disney, this is a smart move. Because of the startup’s multiple services, Huddle faces competition from a variety of startups and tech giants including, Lotus, Box.net, and WebEx. And of course, Huddle faces competition from Google Apps and the launch of Google Wave. But despite the competition in the “Enterprise 2.0″ space, Huddle has been steadily gaining traction and should be able to give even Google a run for its money.

Google just officially announced that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave tomorrow. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.

What is Google Wave?

Even after using Google Wave for a few months now, it is still hard to describe exactly what it is. It’s as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing documents collaboratively. It can also be used as a Wiki, to replace email and IM within an organization, or just to organize a pub crawl, as Wave’s Lars Rasmussen points out in today’s blog post. There can be no doubt that Wave feels oddly familiar, especially because of its typical Google design, yet it also represents an alien concept for most users, as it combines so many services into one extremely flexible package but still remains deceptively simple to use.

We got a chance to talk to the core Wave team, including Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon, last night. They were obviously quite excited about the launch and told us about some of the details regarding the invitation process, Wave’s current features, and some of the team’s plans for the future.

Highlights

We will look at the details of the launch below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Google will send out more than 100,000 invites tomorrow
• they will go to three groups: current users on the sandbox server, users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com over the last few months (first-come, first-served), and a few select enterprise users on Google Apps accounts
• more invites will be sent out as the team expands capacity
• users will not be able to invite their friends to Wave directly, but every Wave user will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 friends who will get to the front of the queue for new accounts
• all Wave accounts will move from the sandbox to the wave.google.com domain
• Wave’s contact management system will be integrated with Google Contacts
• the Wave team will highlight robots and widgets from a select number of vendors
• Internet Explorer users will be prompted to install and use Chrome Frame

Wave.Google.com

While the early Wave testers were on a wavesandbox.com account, starting tomorrow, all of these accounts and all the new users will move over to the wave.google.com domain. If you have tested Wave before, don’t expect any new features yet. The Wave team plans to add new features over the next few months, but the current focus in on making sure that the system can scale.

Nominate 8 of Your Friends

Unlike the Gmail beta, Google Wave users who get into the preview tomorrow won’t be able to invite friends directly. Instead, they will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 of their friends for accounts. As the Wave team plans to continue to send out additional invites as it stabilizes the system and adds capacity, these nominated accounts will move to the front of the queue and should get accounts relatively quickly.

For tomorrow, Google officially says that it will send out about 100,000 invitations, though as the Wave team told us yesterday, it will probably send out a few more than that.

Google Contacts

Google Wave will be able to tap into your Google contacts (the developer preview didn’t offer this feature). For now, it will only show contacts who are already using Google Wave, though.

Invite a Robot to Your Wave

On Wednesday, 100,000 users will also be able to use some of the robots and widgets that the developers in the preview wrote over the last few months. These range from widgets that allow you to play games with friends to sophisticated teleconferencing apps, with Twitter and blogging apps in between. We will have a close look at some of the more interesting applications tomorrow, but the featured apps will include a real-time, competitive Sudoku game, a Lonely Planet travel widget, and video chat from 6Rounds and a teleconferencing plugin from Ribbit.

For now, Google Wave will not feature an app store or marketplace for widgets and robots. Instead, every user will see a wave with a small number of featured apps in their accounts and be able to install these thanks to the new installer process the Wave team introduced just a short while ago.

Chrome Frame

When Google launched Chrome Frame, it’s Internet Explorer plugin that can replace the IE rendering engine with Google Chrome, the Wave team already announced that it would support this feature. And indeed, when you go to the Wave homepage with IE, you will now be prompted to install Chrome Frame. As Lars Rasmussen told us, the team is very enthusiastic about Chrome Frame, as it allows the developers to focus on features instead of making sure that Wave runs in Internet Explorer.

In our own experience, Wave definitely works best in Chrome. It will work just fine in Safari and Firefox, though for the most fluid experience, Chrome is currently the best browser.

Still Some Kinks to Work Out

The Wave team stresses that there are still a lot of problems to work out before Wave can really live up to all of its promises. While there was some doubt that the Wave team could actually get the system scaled up and ready for a wider launch earlier this summer, our experience with the developer preview has been very positive over the last few weeks and we definitely noticed that the system became fast and more stable. Now that 100,000 new users will join in, we will obviously have to wait and see how well Wave can scale up to this kind of demand.

For now, chances are that Wave will still crash at times. For major updates, the team will also have to take the whole system down for a few hours now and then.

Missing Features

Some features, however, still need to be implemented. Some of these are quite basic, like the ability to remove users from a wave, while others are a bit more complicated, like the ability to set specific user permissions on a wave. According to the Wave team, many of these missing features will be implemented within the next few months.

How Will People React?

Overall, it will be interesting to see how the Wave infrastructure holds up tomorrow and how people will react when they first see and use Wave.

One of the most popular Twitter clients for the iPhone is Tweetie. Winner of an Apple Design Award, the iPhone app (and the Mac OS X app) has defined the Twitter experience for many users.

Today, Tweetie’s developer, Loren Brichter announced Tweetie 2.0, coming soon for the iPhone and Mac OS X. The final Tweetie 2.0 iPhone beta was seeded to users this morning and if all goes well, the final version will be submitted to Apple later this week.

I’ve had the opportunity to play and use Tweetie 2.0 for several weeks, and below, we’re able to show you some screenshots of the new Tweetie and its features.

Complete Rewrite

Tweetie 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the original iPhone app and it combines the codebases of Tweetie for Mac and Tweetie for iPhone. This means that the applications will not only have more in common, but that changes will be easier to push out to both apps.

Tweetie 2.0 has a ton of new stuff – including support for the new Project Retweet that we previewed last week. The upcoming Twitter geolocation features will also be integrated as soon as those APIs become public.

Additionally, you have the ability to have your saved searches in Tweetie sync with Twitter, view threaded conversations, and link up your Twitter contacts with your iPhone Address Book – which is a great way to keep your contacts aligned (or to quickly call someone right from viewing their Twitter profile.)

New Features

Other features include:

Preview short URLs
Block/follow from multiple accounts
Receive device notifications from select users
Full landscape support (fully configurable)
Improved gesture support
Drafts management
A multiple attachment manager, hashtag picker and more
When you start the app you go right back to where you last were when you quit and caching makes it fast and easy to keep up with new and older tweets.

Still Simple and Sexy

The entire application is really a joy to use. What made the original Tweetie so great is still there, along with all kinds of features that leverage not only the new Twitter APIs and third-party services, but the new iPhone OS 3.0 features too.

Tweetie 2.0 is a whole new app, and it will require the iPhone 3.0 OS and will cost $2.99 in the App Store, the same price as the original Tweetie.

For Mac OS X users, Tweetie 2 will be a free upgrade for all existing users.

What do you think about the new look and features of Tweetie 2.0? What is your favorite iPhone Twitter client?

The rise of Twitter has been the talk of the tech and media world. Last year, it grew 422%. That’s staggering, but nothing compared to the 1,382% growth it experienced earlier this year. And that was before Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN and mass celebrity adoption.

Its growth probably played a big part in Twitter’s recent $1 billion valuation via a staggering $100 million investment. However, an analysis from web stats firm Hitwise may indicate that this investment was a bad idea, as the numbers indicate that Twitter has hit a growth ceiling.

Will Twitter Restart Its Growth?

The analysis, by Hitwise Global Research GM Bill Tancer, first graphs out marketshare of U.S. visits to Twitter, as compared to all other websites. In September of last year, it was around 0.01%. Then growth skyrocketed to a high of around 0.20% in June 2009. Since then though, it’s been dropping, and is now at 0.17%:

The graph of search volume for Twitter tells the same story. Over 0.06% of searches were for Twitter in July, but has now dropped to 0.053%.

Hitwise’s theory is that new user adoption has hit a resistance point. It provides data showing that there has been a significant drop-off of new users to Twitter from the world’s most popular website.

We’ve noticed that Twitter’s phenomenal growth has been stalling, but so have most social media sites this summer. The question is whether this trend continues into the fall or if Twitter can kickstart new user adoption with new features and new influx of cash.

Our opinion? The biggest challenge Twitter faces is finding ways to stop new Twitter users from quitting. It may even be the microblogging service’s Achilles Heel. But they have a seasoned team that’s growing rapidly. And now, with its new cash infusion, it has the ability to acquire new technology and talent to solve this problem. We hope and expect Twitter to get back to its growing ways.

But what do you think? Is Twitter done growing or is this just a bump in the road? Let the debate begin.

Is the real-time web just Silicon Valley buzz built up by hype-masters aiming to cash out? Good evidence otherwise comes from Woopra, an upstart real-time website analytics company that today announced that it’s taking off its Beta label.

Founded in Lebanon and now international, Woopra said today that the service will lift previous account size limits, will offer paid user accounts and will limit free accounts to by invitation only. CEO John Pozadzides recorded an awesome video that’s both humble and inspiring. We learned about the announcement from the blog ArabCrunch, and that blog’s coverage is today’s Real-Time Web Article of the Day.

We’re highlighting one article off-site each day that we think is the most important discussion of the real-time web, leading up to the October 15th ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit.

ArabCrunch editor Gaith Saqer explains the importance of Woopra’s announcement today in his coverage.

• Seeing a Lebanon-founded company taking this step in the red-hot real-time web market is a great data point about the international nature of the real-time web movement. Woopra’s CEO is now in Dallas, Texas.
• The product is priced higher than some ostensible competitors, but its availability as a desktop client for Windows, Mac and Linux computers is very appealing for some users.
• Monetization of consumer-level real-time web products, outside of advertising, is itself newsworthy.

Look at how charming that video is! The CEO identifies himself only as “John P., one of the team members at Woopra.” It’s a really frank explanation of how the company is just looking to become cashflow neutral. Imagine, someone humbly asking a relatively small community of software users to pay so that the company’s staff can simply sustain itself. What a radical departure from the typical startup CEO pitch you hear from companies on the bleeding edge of web trends!

Woopra clearly prioritizes authentic communication with its users. The company hired well-known WordPress consultant Lorelle VanFossen to be the company blog’s Editor in Chief.

Woopra watchers can’t be surprised by the announcement, the way it was made or the seemingly very positive reaction from the Woopra community. As Mohamed Marwen Meddah explained on StartupArabia today, “All this of course is a natural step forward for Woopra, that was in the plans from the beginning, in order to start generating revenue, cover the costs of their infrastructure, and make the company and service sustainable.”

This kind of attitude is more than welcome at the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. There will be plenty of real-time rock stars there but riding the wave of change that the pushbutton web will bring and building sustainable businesses are both valid ways to engage as well.

peHUB yesterday caught wind of Microsoft’s supposed acquisition of Interactive Supercomputing, a company specialized in bringing the power of parallel computing to desktops, but was declined an official comment to the news following a request for confirmation. Redmond has this morning officially announced the acquisition by means of a blog post on the Windows Server Division Weblog and an information website, detailing that it has picked up the technology assets of ISC and that the latter's employees – including CEO Bill Blake – will be joining the Microsoft team at the New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA. Microsoft says it will not continue developing Star-P (ISC's flagship product) beyond version 2.8 which was released earlier this year, and that version 2.9 that was released to a few customers in Beta will not be released for production use by customers. Active Star-P customers who are using earlier versions of Star P were granted the right to upgrade to 2.8 by ISC prior to the close of the transaction. Microsoft did not acquire the customer contracts between ISC and their customers but says it will provide technical support to active customers through the longer of their existing support contracts or 12/31/2010.

Of all the companies in the web startup world, Zoho is perhaps the most persistent. Their office suite competes with the biggest player in the market, Google, but they tirelessly innovate, presenting new products and features on a monthly basis.

That said, lately they’ve been focused on integrating and improving their existing services, and they haven’t launched a new product in about a year. This changed today with Zoho Discussions, a service that further expands the Zoho Suite and lets anyone create an online forum community.

The best way to experience Zoho Discussions is to visit Zoho’s own forums, which use the same technology.

Key features include advanced and easy user management, user labels (which indicate special users, such as company employees), feeds and notifications, privacy controls and topic moderation, and integration with other Zoho services such as Zoho contacts.

Zoho Discussions can’t compete with advanced forum solutions such as Invision Power Board or phpBB, but for a company’s internal forum or a bug suggestion board it has all the features you’d want. Most importantly, with Zoho’s wide area of products and services, which are all tightly integrated into one another, Zoho is slowly becoming what the upcoming Google Wave aspires to be: a fully integrated communication/document creation/sharing platform for companies and individuals alike.

Trying to explain Wowd, a Silicon Valley-based search venture, is a buzzword extravaganza.

Using cloud architecture and crowdsourced data on web pages, this real-time discovery and recommendation engine ranks pages based on whether users actually visited them and returns results from all over the web, not just a handful of indexed pages. Read on for the details on Wowd’s technology, a video interview with their CEO, and yes, invitations to join the private beta.

It’s a downloaded app, but it runs in a browser. Personal information isn’t stored on a centralized server, and no registration is required; yet browsing history is saved to recommend more personally relevant and interesting content.

The cloud arichitecture – that is, the distribution of processing power and bandwidth needed to power real-time indexing across all user desktops – allows Wowd to acheive a monumental feat core to their value proposition: Real-time indexing of the entire web, not just a handful of sites and not just pages linked to from real-time social sites. Essentially, it’s the same kind of P2P network technology that makes Skype or SETI@home possible; all the nodes in the network share bandwidth-intensive tasks, such as indexing the entire Internet in real time.

Here’s how the indexing and ranking work: Each time a user who has downloaded and installed Wowd visits a website, without his taking any further action, that page is “voted up” on Wowd. Conceptually, it’s a little bit like Digg or Hacker News in that the number of users rather than keywords, backlinks, or timeliness, determine ranking.

At scale, this could mean that Wowd would be a more workable version of the human-powered search engine, which their team believes will always generate more interesting results than a machine-powered search engine.

Wowd is funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), KPG Ventures, and the Stanford University Engineering Venture Fund. Their team includes startup vets with a total of four successful exits and experience working on projects such as the Intel P6 processor and technology for surface operations on Mars.

Check out this interview with Wowd CEO Mark Drummond, conducted by Tim Reha:

In terms of data privacy, Wowd’s system doesn’t look at local files, Wowd searches, IP addresses, personal behavior, secure pages or pages that require a login, or any sites “blacklisted” in a user’s settings. And of course, Wowd’s default setting blocks their gathering data on any adult-content pages; that is to say, all your pr0n will still belong to you.

The first 300 ReadWriteWeb readers to click here will also be able to join Wowd’s private beta and experience firsthand the magic of human-powered recommendations.

It’s hard to type a blog post when one hand is being used to pat myself on the back.

Last year I wrote a post about the just launched Chrome browser titled Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer. From that article:

Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows…Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.

One representative response to my quote above, from The Register: “In no way can this statement be construed to make sense, and I’m not just being a pedantic asshole here. Fortunately, El Reg readers are with it enough to know that you need a proper OS before you can have a browser.”

Purists complained that a browser isn’t actually an operating system, and brought up mundane issues about hardware drivers, memory and processor management, and other red herrings. Sure, they were right – the Chrome browser isn’t an operating system. It is, you could say, sans the bag of drivers needed to meet the definition. Still, the writing was on the wall – Google quite clearly saw Chrome as an operating system that competes with Windows.

Fast forward to today. The Chrome browser now has 30 million active users, says Google, and tracking services say it has 6% or so market share. Not bad for a browser that’s less than a year old.

And now, WOW. Google just bolted a big ol’ bag of drivers (also known as the Linux kernel) to Chrome and are calling it the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s going to be hard for people to continue to deny its operating systemness now.

The new OS will focus entirely on the web: “The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.” What that means is this. The browser is the platform. The browser is the UI.

Now, finally, even the tech purists can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Windows is hardware management plus an application platform, and we call that an OS. Chrome OS is hardware management plus an application platform (the browser), and we call that an OS, too.

Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

Chrome will do just that. And it will be free, unlike Windows. Forget the netbooks, which Google is targeting initally. We’ll see PCs of all types being sold by the major manufacturers as soon as Google gets this out of beta next year. Microsoft has a very serious competitive threat to the core of their revenues. Every Chrome computer bought won’t have Windows and won’t have Office. That must send chills down the spine of the guys up in Redmond. But hey, at least they can now point to Google when the antitrust guys come knocking. Someone other than them are bundling the operating system and browser into one neat package.

One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post, or the one at right. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.

More importantly, the retweet buttons will begin supporting URL shortening service other than bit.ly, and will include an option for sites to choose their own custom short URL. (For instance, we use http://tcrn.ch). Tweetmeme will also offer analytics for site owners to see how their retweets are spreading. Basic data will be free, and Tweetmeme will likely charge for more detailed analyticss. All of this, of course, also turns into valuable data for Tweetmeme to determine the most popular links and stories on Twitter, and makes Tweetmeme itself a better news aggregation site.