Susan Scrupski of ITSinsider wrote an interesting post about the influx of GenYers into the corporate world and the resulting culture clash that may ensue. The issue of generational disparity has been widely discussed by business visionary and author Don Tapscott who has raised not only the challenge of this cultural clash, but also the opportunity. It’s been a common theme through many of his books. So which is it? Will GenYers entering the workforce show us a new way to work or will they be quickly course-corrected by a stodgy corporate culture? Susan points to fellow Irregular Larry Dignan who writes:

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In preparation for next week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference we have launched a new Enterprise 2.0 community site, built on the Jive Clearspace platform. This is version 1.0 of a site we plan to build upon to support the growing community of interest around the concepts and technologies of Enterprise 2.0. For now the primary focus is on supporting and connecting the vibrant community surrounding next week’s conference. You can network with peers, download speaker presentations and engage in discussion through Jive’s threaded

discussion groups or the Meebo back channel we have built into the site. Every session at the conference has a back channel component. One of things that impresses me most in running this conference is the incredibly strong and growing community surrounding it. I hope you’ll check out the new site and join the conversation.

While Enterprise 2.0 deals mostly with the application of software and the associated organizational challenges and opportunities, it’s important to look one layer deeper at the software industry and recognize that we’ve also embarked on a major change in the deployment of software itself. While we’re still early in this new era, companies are beginning to examine the merits of cloud-based computing for their business applications. “The cloud” is a pretty broad term these days, used to describe everything from infrastructure-on-demand and application hosting services to companies that sell application subscriptions from web-based platforms. While some are embracing the cloud, others have legitimate questions and concerns. At next week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference we’ll tackle those issues at “An Evening in the Cloud” - an event you won’t want to miss.

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Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb wrote up a nice piece about our Launch Pad program which is taking place at next week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Each of the five finalists will take center stage at the event and go into more detail on the idea or product that has carried them this far in the competition. These guys have already survived 2 rounds of voting so they have somethng unique to offer. They’ll face their last vote at the close of the Launch Pad program - think “American Idol” but without the annoying commercial breaks! The winner will be decided live using a mobile phone voting system powered by Mozes (thanks Mozes!). The program is being hosted by industry writer and strategist Stowe Boyd who always has his ear to the ground for interesting new ideas. Sarah did a nice job describing what each one submitted so I’d recommend a read to see what these guys are up to. The finalists are Aegeon, GroupSwim (Jason from Group Swim guest posted here a few weeks ago), Newsgator, Project SocialSite and Veodia. Congratulations to our finalists and thanks to everyone who participated.

The finalist submissions for the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad are posted and you have through Monday May 26th to place your votes. As a reminder, we’re looking for the most interesting, desired, wild, crazy, and/or cool tools and technologies for the enterprise. The top 4 submissions will present live at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference where a winner will be selected via a live audience vote.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the social enterprise lately and for good reason. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that people are the ones using business software and that people are generally social by nature. We want to connect with each other, share information and build networks of expertise within our organizations. This is a big part of Enterprise 2.0 and welcomed new perspective on business software.

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The Enterprise 2.0 community is very fortunate to have some excellent bloggers, many of whom were at our conference last year. As a small “thank you” to the bloggers for the information, insight and analysis they provide, we have offered a free conference pass for bloggers to give away to one of their readers. So if you’re looking to score a free pass to this year’s program, you may want to visit some of our blogging faithful:

If you’re an Enterprise 2.0 blogger and would like to request a pass for one of your readers, drop us an email.

Here’s a big shout out to the eight companies selected to move onto round two of the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad. These companies were selected by audience vote based on their short video submissions of interesting, desired, wild, crazy, and/or cool tools and technologies built for the enterprise. The winners are busy working on their round two videos which will be a bit longer and provide a little more detail. The top four presenters from round two will be invited to give their pitch live at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston where the live audience will select one winner.

Round One Winners:

Be sure to vote on the round two videos beginning May 19th.

While Irwin is Tungling, I’m Tweeting. But at the risk of labeling myself “un-cool” I need to ask - are people finding practical uses for Twitter in business? For those even less cool than I, Twitter is one of several micro-blogging platforms that allow short (usually fewer than 200 characters), text-based updates to people in your network. The Twitter entry on Wikipedia references some very interesting uses of micro-blogging including communication between firemen during the 2007 California wildfires. That’s a great example, but what about the rest of us regular, non-firefighting people? What’s in this for us?

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The video submissions for the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad are in. We’ve got some interesting submissions so be sure to weigh in on the most interesting, desired, wild, crazy, and/or cool tools and technologies for the enterprise. The top 8 submissions will be invited back for round 2 of voting. The final 4 will be invited to speak at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference where the winner will be selected by the audience during the live Launch Pad program. Voting will continue through today, May 12th.