• Obama 2012 campaign playlist revealed courtesy of Spotify

  Depending on your taste in music and tolerance for others’ tastes, President Barack Obama’s latest social media move – sharing his 2012 campaign playlist via streaming music website Spotify – might be a case of over-sharing: Ricky Martin, REO Speedwagon and James Taylor all made the cut.

• UC services market to grow 13.8 per cent year-on-year: Report

  Managed services and hosted offerings are forecasted to drive unified communications (UC) growth of 13.8 per cent year-on-year up to 2018, according to Frost & Sullivan.

• Before Facebook: How other recent dot-com IPOs have fared

  Although Facebook (FB - to be traded on NASDAQ or NYSE) is by far the most high-profile dot-com company to go public over the past year, it is actually one of several companies that have led to a revival of web company IPOs. And while many dot-com IPOs have been long on hype, they haven't yet paid off in terms of shareholder value.

• Facebook ripe for ridicule as it suffers outage a day after IPO filing

  Social networkers resorted to Twitter during and following a brief Facebook outage on Thursday, a day after the company filed for its initial public offering.

• 9 "university researcher approved" tips for awesome Tweeting

  Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech have issued a list of 9 tips for better tweeting based on a study of Twitter usefulness (see "Most tweets are useless, Twitter users say").

• The ABCs of VoIP

  Given the importance of telephone systems, refreshing the technology can be daunting. However, for small and midsized businesses who consider upgrading from a PBX to VoIP, the benefits are clear and, with proper planning, the implementation is not very frightening. Consider these three steps:

• Wikipedia celebrates a decade of edit wars, controversy and Internet dominance

  Wikipedia and its users are planning more than 300 celebration events across six continents for the 10th anniversary of the free, online encyclopedia that has become an Internet juggernaut by spreading access to information with a model that lets anyone edit its articles.

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  5 open source VoIP softphones to watch

  The steady rise in people using IP telephony to communicate -- for personal and business reasons -- has led to the development of a number of different VoIP "softphones" that can be used on a PC or notebook.

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  The battle over voice, the war of UC

  Last week, I wrote about the possible implications of the new lineup of FCC commissioners. They certainly haven't wasted any time: On Aug. 3, the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the decision by Apple and AT&T to reject Google's voice application for the iPhone. As Sanford Bernstein telecom analyst Craig Moffatt notes, "The issue of application suppression affords the Administration a back door route to Wireless Net Neutrality, something that has been openly espoused by new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski."

• The why and how of voice portals

  For years, IT and business have heard the sexy promise of "IP convergence," which would allow all sorts of voice- and video-enabled applications to appear in business. However, for most organizations, this Jetsons-like vision has yet to occur.

• Beware of UC security threats

  Unified communications opens up your VoIP network to new avenues of collaboration, including instant messaging, video, business applications and e-mail. And that opens up your network to new avenues of attack.

Whitepapers about unified communications

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  Securing Vital Infrastructure

  A unified approach to information security can help modern vital infrastructure providers deal with evolving IT threats without compromising on communications or the demands of an increasingly mobile workforce. Flexible policies, combined with quality inbound threat detection, deep content inspection and encryption capabilities can help organisations to mitigate the risks – not just from outside the organisation, but also within it. Read this whitepaper.

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  User adoption: Will your communications deployment score or be left on base?

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  From Voice Over IP To Unified Communications Simplify System Management

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  IDC VENDOR SPOTLIGHT: Harnessing the power of enterprise collaboration and communications