In January 2003, two acquisition announcements rocked the online meeting marketplace. On January 16, Macromedia announced the acquisition of Presedia. Presedia's flagship product, Express enables non-technical professionals to use tools, such as PowerPoint, to annotate presentations with audio, and combine these elements into a streaming Macromedia Flash application delivered via the web.

Less than a week later, Microsoft announced its agreement to acquire PlaceWare. By combining key assets and working in tandem, the two companies aim to provide customers with innovative and easy-to-use online conferencing solutions.

The real beauty is in the emerging technologies of Flash and the power of webcasting. Recent developments within Macromedia Flash (which is present on over 80% of the Internet desktops) such as the FLV file format, will make streaming video and audio more deliverable and accessible than ever.

Just how big is webcasting and collaborative technology going to be? Well, the META Group said, “The business value of web conferencing is so strong that we believe 90 percent of Global 2000 knowledge workers will have access to web conferencing services by 2007. Along with instant messaging and teamware, web conferencing completes the next-generation collaboration troika that will enable companies to dramatically lower business coordination costs during the next 10 years.”

Dylan Greene shares his 10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time. I agree with most of them, but don't really care about things like wasting bandwidth. Think about it. Most of those who've been smart enough to figure out how to get RSS feeds are on broadband and could give two shakes about bandwidth. I also disagree that "reading" RSS requires too much work. Reading is the great part. I read 25 sites through RSS and it's the most time I could save in a day. I do think, however, that they're a bitch to find and subscribe to, and there are too many standards, as Dylan states. I wish that every site I likes had an RSS feed, but they don't...

Dylan, you might also be incorrect on the number of posts that RSS readers can keep current with. NewsGator and BlogLines, both of which I've used (although I've switched to Bloglines simply because I don't have Outlook everywhere I go...) allow me to download as many RSS entries as I want. I just grabbed 250 entries from Scoble's blog.

BTW, check out the RSS Winterfest today and tomorrow.

I'm currently blogging from Kavarna, a coffee shop in downtown Green Bay, WI, which has recently added Wi-Fi Internet access to it's menu of customer offerings. I'm ecstatic.

There are great articles on this trend at both Trendsetters and The Economist.

Having gone through a fairly intersting branding and naming brainstorm session today, I was pleasantly surprised to find this timely post from Fast Company on "The Brand Called..."

While FC said that Wordlab seems to be a silly-ish side projects undertaken by the fine folks at Igor International, a naming and branding agency based in San Francisco. The main Web site is actually quite useful -- if not more so -- than their Worldlab spoof, and they've even been kind enough to outline their naming process for others to follow.

David Cohen has an interesting article in ClickZ today about maintaining credibility and objectivity in front of clients, relating specifically to the situations when you realize that Interactive marketing is NOT right for that client. How do you tell? When would YOU recommend that a client NOT do Interactive, vis-a-vis other "non-interactive" marketing tactics (I'll let you my Marketing Principles textbook if you need to refresh :).

Ironic as it seemed to me when I first started with an Interactive company, Interactive is not always the best way for us to market for the purpose of obtaining new clients and establishing our credibility as an Interactive company to those who may require our services.