Business

Facebook will be partnering with American Express to launch the “Facebook Big Break for Small Business” contest which will run from April 25 thru May 20th.

With the Facebook Big Break for Small Business contest, 5 U.S. small business owners can win $20,000 cash prize, free one-on-one consulting about their current use of Facebook, and a two-day advertising and marketing boot camp at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. The training will include best practices for using Facebook, pages, ads and social plugins.

For the lucky winners, this tutorial could be particularly helpful, especially as four out of five U.S. businesses with 100 or more employees is expected to be engaged in social media by 2011.

“75% of businesses have increased their projected social media budget this year,” says Black Box Social Media Co-Founder Nick Bridges. “This number shows that social media marketing is here to stay.”

To enter the Facebook and American Express Small Business contest, small business owners need to visit Amex’s page on Facebook and provide answer to a questionnaire about their company. Amex will pre-select ten finalists and then Facebook fans will vote for five winners.

www.facebook.com/SmallBusinessSaturday?sk=app_171126146271518

IBM is offering a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) package that costs US$150 per user annually.

“The IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business offering should help ease the high administrative overhead normally associated with setting up VDI deployments,” said Dan Cerutti, general manager of IBM’s Smart Business Solutions unit.

“We’ve dramatically simplified how you order and buy these things. Everything is included in the Virtual Desktop Solution,” Cerutti said.

The VDI package will allow workers to access desktops from a variety of devices, including iPads and thin clients. They could access both Microsoft Windows and Linux-based operating system desktops. Users can even run the desktops without connectivity, by use of a USB drive.

The desktops are managed centrally, on IBM System X servers running Suse Linux. The desktop virtualization is done through the Verde software, offered by Virtual Bridges

The free online meeting provider used in over 200 countries, Mikogo, is welcoming all Dimdim customers to its service as the new source for free and reliable online meetings. The sudden news came yesterday that Dimdim has been acquired by Salesforce.com and that subscriptions to the online meeting service will end, some as early as March 15 this year. Thousands of businesses will be looking for an online meeting alternative, and Mikogo believes that it has the right service to meet those needs.

Dimdim always promoted the use of their service for free, and the news that its service will end could lead customers to highly-priced web meeting providers. This has led Mikogo to speak up and welcome Dimdim customers to its free online meeting service.

Since 2007, Mikogo has been making a strong name for itself in the world of online collaboration. There are now over half-a-million registered Mikogo users who participate in millions of free desktop sharing sessions each year for online meetings, web presentations and remote support. With such experience in providing its web collaboration solution to the Mikogo user base, Dimdim users will be welcomed and presented with an easy-to-use solution for their upcoming meetings.

“Our compatriots at Dimdim did a fantastic job at promoting the use of free online meetings compared to paying the larger web collaboration corporations, such as WebEx™ and GoToMeeting™, for their services,” says Mark Zondler, Mikogo’s Managing Director and Co-Founder. “But they have been presented with a great offer by Salesforce.com, so it’s no surprise that they have accepted and gone down this path. However we know that users of online meeting software become very dependent upon such a service for their daily work. Hence we would like to welcome all Dimdim users to use Mikogo, and can assure them a high-quality and reliable service for their online meetings.”

In fact, Dimdim users are already talking about Mikogo. David Riecks from Illinois wrote on Twitter: “Good thing I found @Mikogo yesterday, as I just got a note that Dimdim.com has been acquired by Salesforce.com and free accounts close March 15!”

More info about Mikogo is available at www.mikogo.com

Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) announced it acquired messaging and screen-sharing company Dimdim for about $31 million as the software company looks to build on the rapid adoption of Chatter, its new business-collaboration software.

“It’s all about Chatter” Chief Executive Marc Benioff said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires. “We want more collaboration services than ever before in Chatter” for things like instant messaging and online meetings. Salesforce did not have the in-house expertise to build those services, he added.

The move comes amid ongoing consolidation in the software industry. Last month, Salesforce said it would acquire the Heroku cloud platform for $212 million, a move it hopes will give it a leading position in programming tools for applications residing on the Internet.

Features from Dimdim will be integrated into the next major version of Chatter, Benioff said. That new version will either be announced or rolled out in August at the company’s annual customer meeting, he said.

The San Francisco-based company launched Chatter in June, offering features reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter for corporate collaboration. Chatter is Salesforce’s first product marketed through a company, rather than just to the sales or customer service departments that are the company’s traditional customer targets.

Today, about three-quarters of the companies that are Salesforce customers use Chatter, the company has said.

“Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives” Benioff said in a statement. “The acquisition of Dimdim will help Salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular Internet site”

The company expects the Dimdim deal to reduce its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings by a penny and its earnings for fiscal 2012 by 4 cents to 5 cents. The deal won’t materially affect revenue in either period.

“We bought it for a relatively low cost” Benioff said in the interview. “We’re buying it primarily for the technology”

Dimdim was founded in 2007 and has offices in Lowell, Mass. and Hyderabad, India. Its platforms let users host or attend live online meetings, demos and webinars using a web browser.