What on earth was the Yahoo! board thinking that it could reject Microsoft’s bid at $31 a share and come out the other side looking credible? OK - so there are egos involved here but at the end of the day investors rule. As Dave Taylor said:

Mashable writer Paul Glazowski also misses the point: “Is it greed that’s being exercised today? I would say no. At least not entirely, anyway. I would instead presume this move to be a tactical maneuver employed by the board to disabuse Microsoft of the notion that it will have an easy acquisition.” I agree that this is a tactical move by the all-too-invisible Yahoo board, but here’s what few people seem to be realizing:

It doesn’t matter if the Board approves the offer from Microsoft because it’s a hostile offer.

Microsoft is unlikely to jack up the ante to the reported $40 per share asking price reported as being an acceptable figure by Brier Duddly. Which equates to the outlandish $56bn as posited by our own Garrett Rodgers. Unless of course Microsoft has become fiscally brain damaged. Given it’s cadre of some 800 lawyers, that seems highly unlikely.

Seeing the massive exposure of this proposed takeover, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has plenty to consider. Including Plan B and a possible Microsoft breakup. Or worse still, the prospect of going down in history as the man who wrecked Microsoft for the sake of demonstrating to the world that he really isn’t the world’s richest employee. Whatever happens, the ride is far from over.

But be warned. Today’s announcement makes Mike Krigsman’s earlier assertion of enterprise confusion and concern all the more credible. Stakes this high should sound warning bells for any decision taker. Don’t be surprised if Microsoft announces a stalling of business software license sales in its next quarter’s financial analyst call.

When Tom Foremski says he has a ‘reliable source’ you can be pretty sure he’s in the know:

I’m hearing from a reliable source that Salesforce.com has approached Oracle to gauge if there is any interest in a sale at $75 a share. That would be almost a 50 per cent premium over Friday’s close of $50.87.

Tom then goes on to spell out why the deal makes sense. This is an occasional topic of conversation among the Irregulars. We view Oracle as the only natural home for Salesforce.com, largely based on the cultural fit but also because Oracle doesn’t have a big brand presence in the on-demand market.

A sticking point might be Larry Ellison’s assertion that cloud computing isn’t for Oracle at this time. At least that’s what he said at the last earnings call. Nevertheless, Tom’s succession argument that positions Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as filling Larry’s boots sounds persuasive. One wonders whether current Oracle president Charles Phillips might have something to say on that score, especially given his star status as industry consolidator.

Or it could all be an ugly rumor spread for the benefit of a press currently obsessed with the antics over at Microhoo.

Now that CapeClear has been scooped up by Workday, what of the handful of credible independent players left in the integration and business process management market? Fellow Irregular and investment fund manager Jason Wood had this to say:

Go back and look at how TIBCO was talking up Matrix eight quarters ago, and then slowly but surely as it came time to deliver they started backing off of it, until the point when it wasn’t even mentioned on the last few calls. The Spotfire acquisition was an egregious attempt to mask slowing organic growth; yet there are absolutely zero synergies that I can discern.

Vivek [Ranadive, CEO TIBCO] has long stood as someone unwilling to sell his company’ but methinks that’s changed now that he sees the writing on the wall. The question becomes, who is the white knight? You wouldn’t be buying TIBCO for technological supremacy or a new market opportunity. I think the only real value is acquiring their installed base and is that enough to justify a nice premium to the current stock price? Maybe, but not a bet I’m making.

As to Progress they’ve held up remarkably well in a toxic U.S. tech tape, and somehow defied critics in the process. The idea of rolling up a bunch of disparate SOA and integration tools into one corporate umbrella sounds like a disaster, but Progess has pulled it off, at least for now.

Devastating stuff you might think in a market where shareholder value is measured by the degree to which your company is likely acquisition fodder. Even so, TIBCO continues to win marquee customers like Carphone Warehouse and Calor while expanding existing business with Air France-KLM, UBS and Delta. It’s last reported saw record sales. Next week TIBCO will announce technical updates to its suite of products.  In EMEA, TIBCO’s marketing team is extremely busy. Progress is doing very nicely positioning Apama as a leading edge event processing play in financial services.

I spoke with Giles Nelson, the man who originally developed the Apama engine at Progress. He said: “We view CapeClear and BEA’s being acquired as good for us because it gives us an opportunity to become a more distinctive choice. CapeClear gives Workday much greater reach while removing from market a cmopany that was looking increasingly isolated. In the BEA case, you’ve got to ask whether Oracle is getting best value given the degree of overlap and relative underperformance of Aqualogic.”

The rhetoric is understandable but what about others. Phil Wainewright says:

I would class Progress more as a complete stack provider with a future as a platform provider to SaaS providers — in competition with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sun and open source alternatives. Though expect some consolidation in that field, too.

More vulnerable are the vendors who are middleware only - TIBCO and IONA in particular but lets throw in another couple names for discussion. What about Software AG? I know it has other strings to its bow but it’s very much an infrastructure company lacking a complete platform story. HP is more systems management, monitoring and governance than integration but is that something that can remain independent or does it get sucked up into the stack too?

Although TIBCO will raise issue with Phil on his positioning, the discussion raises an interesting question around best in class versus one stop shop buying behavior. This is a perennial topic of conversation with no clear resolution. If you prefer one throat to choke then you buy into Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle (MISO.) Doing so inevitably leads to compromises in consolidating markets. Once acquired, vendors lose the innovative edge which kept them vibrant. That’s OK if your business is relatively slow moving or stable and does not require a constant diet of innovation. But, as seems to be the case today, integration is not going away, then an independent company that continues to develop would be an apparently obvious and logical choice. Whether that’s a viable proposition in a market where the financial engineers smell blood is another matter.

But then Vinnie Mirchandani asks:

What is wrong in companies staying independent? I have yet to see a compelling value prop from CA and IBM and Oracle and HP from a buyer perspective after 100 acquisitions between them over the 15 years.

That’s worth bearing in mind when thinking about the next integration deal you might wish to do. I’d rather have a healthy, vibrant and independent market where choice helps keep the remaining software application market competitive than see the companies mentioned succumb to the temptation of a premium on their current stock price.

Last week, Robert Scoble wrote:

So, every month that Microsoft and Yahoo will be stuck in some courtroom arguing out why this is a good deal means money in the bank for Google as they close mobile phone deal after mobile phone deal.

Forget the courtoom thing for a moment because it won’t be the rainmakers that are in court. I want to look at the mobile angle in the context of the Microhoo debate.

If Google was closing deals with Vodafone, T-Mobile, Verizon, Telefonica, China Mobile and the many other carriers around the world then I’d agree that it’s in a supremely strong position. But as far as I am aware, it’s not. Instead, we see Google closing music distribution deals. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Now, Google is preparing a counterstrike, according to people close to the situation. The U.S. search giant is in the late planning stages of a joint venture with a Chinese online music company that would permit it to provide free — licensed — music downloads in China.

People on Techmeme thinks this is a big deal. I spoke with Dale Vile, principal analyst with Freeform Dynamics and a long time observer of the mobile space. His view was unequivocal: “Anyone who thinks that owning a thin slice of the total mobile services market will make them a dominant player is plain daft.” Why? Several reasons.

First, the real money is in bundled services and business applications. This is where Yahoo! has genuine strengths. As part of my research for this piece, I installed YahooGo! beta 3 which was launched at CES. I don’t recall hearing a lot of noise about it but this is a genuinely cool and useful bundle of applications that happens to include email - one of the areas Scoble dimisses. As someone who has been an avid GMail and GoogleReader fan, I could be easily persuaded that Yahoo! Go has more than enough utility for my needs wrapped up in the best looking mobile protal interface I’ve seen. Check the CES video for a quick round up of features to see what I mean.

More important for both Yahoo! and Microsoft, Yahoo! Go beta 3 has cleverly embedded subtle advertisements that I don’t find offensive or intrusive. Isn’t this one of the places Microsoft wants to be? If Microsoft does win in its bid for Yahoo!, this would be one of the first apps bundles I’d want to be reviewing because as David Tebbutt, another Freeform analyst says:

It’s interesting that when Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang was in London last October, he revealed a change of attitude in the company in favour of supporting developers rather than trying to do everything itself. This just happens to resonate well with Microsoft’s approach.

Second, while Google may gain a position with its music play in the burgeoning Chinese market, it is the global carriers who control what happens in the wider mobile market. That’s what Pat Phelan, CEO of MaxRoam believes. He should know because MaxRoam is disrupting the traditional mobile market with its ‘go anywhere’ at low cost service. Once the carriers realize the potential for these high bandwidth sucking applications, they’ll want a piece of the pie. How will they do this? All they need do is throttle back bandwidth access in the name of coverage concerns and Google will have to negotiate for another split on whatever they’re taking out of the deal. Sayonara freeloading on the Internet. Given Google’s presence in the market place, you can be sure that carriers will be eying up Google’s margins and pounding the calculators to reckon how much they can take.

But is mobile the Big Thing so many people believe? Opinion among the Irregulars was sharply divided. Anshu Sharma, who wrote a compelling argument in favor of Microhoo going after new markets said:

I was myself firmly in the mobile is overhyped camp till about a year ago when 2 things happened: I went to India and saw my dad, my sister, my handyman - all use a $50 mobile phone with text messaging for paying bills, checking back balance, reading news alerts, etc. These millions of new consumers will more naturally migrate to higher functionality mobile phones than to a PC. Second, I myself subscribed to a data plan and found it to be immensely useful from Google Maps directions to checking mail on the go.
Yes, the percentage of “web” traffic from mobiles is probably in single digits but that’s why its an open space for Microhoo and Google to fight it out.

Jeff Nolan was unequivocal:

GOOG is unquestionably dominant in one category alone, search advertising. Everything else is a toss up.
And with all due respect to Scoble, the idea that mobile apps are the real end game is laughable and indicates a serious case of Valley Echochamberitis. Let’s round it off and say that there were 2 billion handsets shipped last year alone, how many of those were data capable (from a practical use standpoint, in other words, I could actually use them for data as opposed to the technical specs saying I could)? Maybe 30 million? Apple shipped 4 million iPhones in a year and they have always said that 15-20 million handsets would be a blowout for them.
Mobile web apps are simply not mainstream apps, they are enablers for a core service that is still provided through a browser. GOOG could own mobile apps and they would still be a minor business unit.

Both points of view are valid and much will depend on whether you believe Microhoo! will make a name for itself in what Anshu describes as ‘blue-ocean’ markets or whether mobile apps do come into their own in a big bang way. If you believe many commentators, it’s game over with Google declared as the Internet (and almost by definition mobile) winner. I don’t believe it’s that simple and err towards those who believe there is enough headroom to allow several large scale players to do well. Regardless of the Microsoft+Yahoo!= Big Mess as characterized by Long Zheng, there are some genuine nuggets to be had which play directly to Yahoo! and Microsoft’s potentially combined strengths. Let’s not get too hung up on the downbeat hubris and concentrate instead on where this might score huge dividends. Even if there is merit in what Scoble said:

…put two turkeys together and you don’t get an eagle.

The French finance ministry has slammed Société Génerale, saying they knew there were deficiencies in their approach to controlling risk prior to rogue trader Jérome Kerviel’s disastrous run. Finextra reports that:

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told reporters that SocGen failed to apply appropriate controls over Jérome Kerviel, who was allegedly able to use loopholes in controls and circumvent risk management procedures to make a series of unauthorised bets on European futures…

…Lagarde told reporters that SocGen missed a number of “alarms”, most notably in November when derivatives exchange Eurex alerted the French bank about the positions in Kerviel’s book.

These statements appear to back up what I thought earlier when I said that:

If the allegations are right, then Kerviel was executing what forensically is a simple and common fraud accountants term ‘teeming and laldling.’ Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. The fact Kerviel managed to hoodwink superiors indicates both failed process and a lack of basic audit understanding. Given the background to this spectacular case, you have to wonder where this spreads. In my opinion, it isn’t just a matter of security but a fundamental lack of understanding around risk by everyone involved including both internal and external auditors.

While Legarde’s statement answers some of the issues, I have a feeling this case will reveal further deficiencies  in the bank’s control systems.

Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo! raises many questions. High in the list will be discovering Microsoft plans for the merged development organizations. On the press call, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO was careful to point out the extent to which Microsoft ‘respects’ Yahoo!’s development efforts. The fact is that Yahoo! is already losing talent. Can Microsoft do much about this?

I asked fellow Irregular and Redmonk analyst James Governor for his take: “Microsoft is world class at marketing to its developers. It makes it ridiculously easy for them to build applications and it markets them hard. Yahoo! has not done a good job here so there’s plenty of opportunity for Microsoft to get the best out of those resources.” Tick one in the acquisition execution box. More interesting and perhaps a clue to the future comes from an email dated yesterday sent by Brian McAndrews SVP Microsoft Advertiser & Publisher Solutions to staff. This was his outlook for 2008:

While search has been the main driver of the blistering growth of online advertising in the past, at least partially because of the “last ad clicked” performance measurement standard (pioneered by Atlas in the late 90s), we do not believe this will necessarily be the case in the coming years. The current system for tracking ad conversions , while the best available for years, is not optimal because it gives all credit to that last ad seen or clicked – often a search engine – and not any credit to other ad units the consumer may have seen prior that helped influence the user to seek more information about the advertiser. Thus, Search has gotten more than its share of the credit, but that’s starting to change. We’ll be making significant inroads here in 2008 through our continuing ground-breaking work in the area of “conversion attribution,” a new Atlas technology offering that will do a better job of “giving credit where credit is due.”

That said, we’re not discounting the importance of Search as it continues to drive a lion’s share of digital advertising budgets. Our goal is to help advertisers and agencies make their Search campaigns as relevant, targeted and highly converting as possible. We’ve made great strides toward this end, and will continue to make deep investments in both our Live Search engine and Microsoft adCenter to improve the value of our Search offerings for customers.

This seems at odds with what was said on the press call where the executives were at pains to stress the importance of search based advertising, upon which much of Yahoo!’s business rests. It seems clear that Microsoft has two strategies. On the one hand, McAndrew’s position hints at a more socially organized method of advertiser reward and as such represents a direct swipe at Google’s search based model. Quite what this will mean for merged development teams is far from clear but Microsoft will have to navigate these waters very carefully to avoid internal conflict.

But they might have one thing going in their favor. Google’s most recent results demonstrate that the search giant is far from immune to threat. It has so far failed in its social networking initiatives with MySpace. The combination of search and more socially organized advertiser reward in what would be a combined model looks compelling. I agree with James Governor who said: “If Microsoft has truly understood it is the via via community and not the last click then I think Microsoft has jumped into the future.”

That will be attractive to developers who like to think they’re inventing the next great thing. Google might hit back with a pre-emptive strike for Facebook but given Microsoft’s existing $240 million investment which theoretically places a $15 billion price ticket on the company, it is hard to see how Google can acquire without being forced to significantly up the ante. If this is part of Microsoft’s strategy then it is incredibly smart. Force Google to react at a time when it has been weakened and so create doubt for developers who might be tempted away. But what about the products and services Yahoo! already owns?

Yahoo!’s del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming and Pipes are popular services that will likely come under scrutiny in what executives at Microsoft are pitching as an advertising bid. While I would not expect most consumers to walk away from Flickr, the feeling among the Twittersphere is that if Microsoft succeeds, then there will be a level of defection. Luis Suarez, Tom Morris, Al Wood and Paul Walsh talked about moving their Flickr and del.icio.us accounts to alternative services. Veteran industry observer Ed Yourdon asked:

Wonder if they would leave Flickr alone or impose stuff on them.

Nigel James and Al Wood both think these products are not in Microsoft’s DNA so that even if unintended, they’d likely let them languish. I’m less sure. Del.icio.us has had a private beta running for some time that promises to deliver a much enhanced user experience. Flickr remains wildly popular with many services built around it. Assuming the deal is consummated, they may represent relatively minor components in an enlarged Microsoft but the company would be foolish to let them wither.

Endnote: Dan Farber speaks of this as Microsoft’s way of putting a brake on Google while Dana Gardner addresses the question of mutual failure on on-demand.

Many posts taking a variety of positions at Techmeme.

Wire reports say that Microsoft has offered Yahoo! $31 per share or $44.6 billion. This represents a premium of 62% over last night’s closing price. Interestingly, this was the subject of a closed discussion among the Irregulars two days ago. At the time, opinion was divided as to what might happen, despite the persistent rumors.

Assuming Microsoft is successful, and quite frankly we don’t see another suitors likely to come knocking on Yahoo!’s door anytime soon, the marriage will take some consummating. On the one hand, Yahoo! is a media company while Microsoft has aspirations to become a media company. On the other hand, Yahoo! isn’t going anywhere and will take some careful management. It’s a long time since Microsoft made a strategic acquisition of this kind and it will need to muster serious management skills to make the marriage work. Here are some reasons why it might makes good sense:

• Microsoft knows how to run a tight ship and Yahoo! could do with more effective financial management.
• Yahoo! is not a maverick Facebook style company so culture clash is likely to be less though significant and probably the biggest risk given that Microsoft is Seattle based while Yahoo!’s roots are in Silicon Valley. Yahoo! talent may well be tempted to cast their eyes down the street to Google.
• Enterprises already use Yahoo! IM which could provide fresh leverage for Microsoft’s thriving business division.
• Google represents a long term threat to Microsoft in its core business applications. Yahoo! can help it work out how to combat that in ways Microsoft has yet to learn.

This is not a done deal. We have speculated that one of the enterprise giants might think ride in as a white knight. After all, Oracle or IBM could use a vendor aligned to cloud computing and would arguably would make better use of Yahoo!’s assets, applying strong fiscal management.Regardless of the outcome, the move has caught us by surprise. Let the games begin.

Following on from my last piece about Twitter, I also spoke with Craig Cmehil, another Irregular and SAPper. For some weeks, Craig has been running a side project to develop a Twitteresque alternative for use inside the firewall. Wordpress’s Prologue might make a decent alternative but Craig’s work started before that came along.

As a SAPper, Craig knows that security and scalability matter. He also knows that while Twitter has great utility, it could be so much more. The project is still at the ’small pilot’ phase which means that small numbers of people are trying it out to see where it has application. So what does it do other than provide a river of instant messages:

• People can create groups and private channels so that where necessary, conversations can be kept confidential.
• Conversations are threaded
• There are group tag clouds.
• You can embed images that include their URL but not video because that can consume a lot of network bandwidth.
• There is a 5,000 character limit to allow users to include a reasonable amount of detail in their conversations.

One interesting aspect of Craig’s work has been the discovery that Twitterific is not Twitter specific. This means that once he sorts out the API to mimic Twitter behavior, then users will be able to take advantage of the Twitterific client. It won’t have all the functionality Craig has built but all the Twitter-like functions.

Craig doesn’t know whether the project will move out of its current conceptual stage to become something that gets SAP developer funding but he does expect that the concepts behind it will become part of something much more significant.

Enterprise customers may not yet be ready for this style of application but those who are using it are deriving value in much the same way as Jevon Macdonald, another Irregular, is predicting benefit when he says:

• Forces reduction of hierarchy enforcing rules
  • I say this because the more you constrain and layer access controls on “tweets” the less value they have overall, but more significantly, it directly reduces the benefit to the creator
• Personal Brand development - highly personal platform
• Crises discovery and management capability
• Increased awareness of ongoing work
• Interactions between individuals can strengthen their social-network ties to further inform other tools (like search, group forming, etc)
• Potential to outperform other tools in the rate of adoption (low barrier to start using the tool)

To be clear, Jevon also points up some potential negative consequences but at the moment, the upsides seem to have the upper hand.

I’m aware that other developer organizations are working on similar applications designed to meet enterprise needs inside the firewall. It will be interesting to see how these initiatives work their way out into the wider world. One thing is a safe bet. If apps like this take hold then enterprise management is in for a big surprise.

Right now, Twitter is a mess. Most of today, European users have experienced outages of varying length and even hard core Twitter fans are saying they’ve had enough. Some have talked of jumping ship to Pownce or Jaiku. Louis van Proosdij, in answer to TechCrunch France’s Ouriel Ohayon offered:

@OurielOhayon This is where Twitter may fail fast, and Wordpress new Prologue become THE solution with an effective distributed twitter like

No-one seems to know what’s going on yet if you read DataCenter Knowledge, you’d think everything in the garden is rosy. That’s not the case. The Twitter blog told us they’d had a rough night and elicited an as expected amount of sympathy from the mostly US based commenters. All great PR but if you’re in business, absolutely useless.

You can argue that Twitter hardly qualifies as something that’s business critical and therefore any outages don’t matter. Yet TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher and ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick have enough faith in Twitter to agree that it helps them in their daily work. Marshall goes so far as to say it’s paying his rent. If he’d been in Europe today, it would have been costing Marshall money. Is it Joyent’s responsibility? They’re providing the infrastructure aren’t they? Well sort of.

If you check out Adonomics, you’ll see the number of calls to Facebook applications. 12% of those run through Joyent. That’s 3.8 million a day. I know this because I spoke with another Irregular, Rod Boothby who works at Joyent. Now check the graphs for Facebook, Wordpress and Twitter over at Compete. There’s an order of magnitude in difference between the traffic Twitter moves and that of Wordpress and Facebook. It’s reasonable to conclude then that if Twitter is running on Joyent then it isn’t down to Joyent’s infrastructure. I say ‘if’ because anecdotal rumors have suggested otherwise.

Running highly scalable applications is hard. It is rocket science but the problems have been solved. Facebook and, to a lesser extent Wordpress have had their share of problems but nothing like Twitter’s regular stream of outages. I asked Rod if he’d care to comment on the apparent disconnect between what is being said at Data Knowledge Center on the very day that so many Europeans were expressing annoyance. Understandably, he chose not to comment but we did reprise what it takes to run large scale operations.

This is something with which both of us are familiar, Rod as an ex-bank trader and me as someone who spent years understanding what companies like TIBCO do to keep NASDAQ ticking along while responding to demand spikes. Rod’s an IBM MQ Series fan, I’m a TIBCO messaging fan. It matters not because the principles are the same. It’s about moving relatively small packets of data as fast as you can through fat pipes in a controllable manner.

The fact that Joyent is successfully running large amounts of data for Facebook developers tells me it’s a stretch to assume they have a significant role to play in Twitter’s current woes. I may be deluded and I’m sure commenters with direct knowledge will tell me if I am wrong. But from this distance, Twitter’s problems can only mean one thing.

Twitter is trying to reinvent the scaling wheel when companies like IBM and TIBCO worked this out years ago. And it’s not going well. The fact Twitter went down when Steve jobs took to the stage at MacWorld implies they’ve not worked out how to shed load effectively and tune the system to cope for anticipated demand. There could well be other issues.

Much as I am a fan of Twitter the outages are becoming tiresome. Today was a one when I saw for the first time not a few, but many people bemoaning its performance. Whatever the real problems they need to solve them and quickly. Goodwill only takes you so far and it seems to me that tank of fuel is being rapidly drained. Patience is wearing thin.

UPDATE: Joyeur has announced that Twitter is officially OFF Joyent technology as of 10pm last night.

Seesmic, the closed beta ‘video conversation ‘ platform that is uploading more than 4,000 videos per day today announced at Demo 2008 a series of enhancements that will see the service emerge from being an interesting social media experiment to a service that might capture the interest of major brands.

Released today is the much needed conversation threading where users can see replies behind any story. Additional language support has also been added.

Coming in the next few weeks will be the ability to receive videos from the public timeline, replies or your Seesmic friends onto mobile phones. Users will also be able to upload videos and post replies. Today, users can post videos from 300+ supported mobile phones via Shozu or Qik but users cannot download to those devices.

Early adopters have been busy creating additional tools like Kosso’s search that take advantage of Seesmic’s API. According to Loic LeMeur, CEO of Seesmic: “Developers who ask are being given access to all Seesmic video data, replies, social software and recorder data.”

Although Seesmic has been received as a consumer platform, the company has received interest from large brands including L’Oreal. “We met with ten product managers in New York who are talking about developing communities that will focus on receiving sample feedback and offering makeup demonstrations and classes using Seesmic,” says LeMeur.

As to the future, LeMeur added : “There are many enhancements in the pipeline the most important of which I think will be the ability to create groups. In February, we expect to launch shows done by the community, a kind of international CNN for my friends.” Also coming are two desktop clients that will be similar to those offered by Twitter developers.

While Seesmic has a strong presence in the market, Microsoft is understood to be developing something similar integrated into its Sharepoint platform. Chris Dalby, an independent Microsoft developer said in a Seesmic (sic) video: “Microsoft know about the business application potential and have been developing a system called Academy Mobile. Microsoft launched it internally about eight months ago. Their internal sales teams use it.”

Update: Chris Dalby is developing a Seesmic .NET class for asp.net Ajax developers called Time Drain. It is designed to help .NET developers integrate Seesmic into their web applications.