Happy New Year! I’ll do more rabble-rousing soon, but let’s start 2009 with some fun. So, my friends over at cloudworker.org thought up another bright idea for their January contest, which they call ‘the big tweet-off.’ The idea is to explore the changing nature of work by having people submit pictures of their workspaces, which will then be used in some creative mash-up art. So, take a picture, maybe with your cellphone, upload it through twitpic or some other means, and tweet the URL to @cloudworker. If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to start using twitter, this could be it. Contest ends Jan 31. Seems like they have some cool prizes up their sleeves.

I submitted a non-competing entry (since I was kinda involved in getting them started). At first I thought, how can a boring picture of a desk be creative and show off new ways of working? Here’s what I came up with: recursive photos taken by my tethered webcam (the USB cable you see is actually what the camera is connected to). I call this pair of pictures “My desk introspecting.” See if you can beat my creativity!

And a close-up. Doesn’t capture my whole physical workspace, but does capture my virtual workspace.

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Plantronics has announced two new headsets optimized for Microsoft Office Communicator: the wideband .Audio 630M USB binaural headset and the .Audio 615M USB monaural headset. Both promise an excellent quality of experience for users of OCS, and both retail for less than $50.

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In the collaborative space, it’s easy for an enterprise to get in bed with one vendor. Free web apps are particularly attractive, but unfortunately they often come with a dear price. Your company’s data.

For the sake of example, let’s pick on Google and GMail. Migrating over to a new email client after you’ve been using GMail is no easy to task. If you grow from an SMB to a large enterprise overnight, it’s difficult to change which hosted app you use. Same goes for all those Google Docs you utilize on a day to day basis. All those attractive and free applications have an ugly side - locking in your data is an important part of the way these vendors do business.

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Polycom continues to do its part to make video conferencing as integral to communications as voice. Today, the company announced thePolycom Converged Management Application (CMA)and CMA Desktop. Polycom CMA lets Polycom video devices (desktop, group and telepresence systems) share presence information as a part of user contact lists; users can then just click on a name to launch a call to the appropriate endpoint, which will have been provisioned by an IT administrator in advance. CMA Desktop supports high definition (HD) video, voice and content while scaling to thousands of users across an organization.Polycom says that in the future, the products will deliverenhanced integration with UC applications fromAvaya, IBM, Microsoft and Nortel.

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John Dvorak hosts a weekly web show called Cranky Geeks that this week included a lively discussion around the merits of Enterprise 2.0. Panel guests were Sebastian Rupley from PCMagCast.com, Dan Goodin with The Register and tech journalist David Spark. The segment was pretty short but it quickly got to some of the key challenges facing Enterprise 2.0:

• What is it?
• What about security?
• How can companies get employees to use it?

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Rob Carter, CIO of FedEx led the conference on Tuesday with his presentation, “Connectedness: Changing what’s possible.”

He began his talk discussing what he admittedly said we already know, a history of networks: distribution, electrical, telecommunications, and then offered a little of what we didn’t know, a history of FedEx.

All that history proves that none of these communications could have existed, even FedEx, if there wasn’t a strong network behind it. Carter is looking to expand FedEx’s network because it’s viable and that viable networks always expand.

FedEx’s first step to expansion is the realization that FedEx.com should no longer be confined to being just a destination site. As a result FedEx.com has been exposing all its services to other entry points. Here are some examples:

• QuickShip - a .NET shipping application embedded inside of Microsoft Outlook. Allows you to use all your contacts and stay within your addressing application.
• FedEx Mobile - Track packages through your iPhone or other mobile device.
• FedEx Desktop - Advanced tracking application developed in Adobe Air. Operates outside of the browser. Can see inbound and outbound packages. If an event happens with any of your packages, for example something has cleared customs or gets held up, you’ll get an alert.
• eBay ShipRush - Integrate FedEx into an eBay seller’s site and community.

Carter believes that enterprise 2.0 is about disassembling the walls of the enterprise. And for those of us who work in an enterprise environment, we know how difficult that can be. Think it’s difficult for FedEx? It was even tougher for the CIA. See the next post about “Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community.”

He closed with a George Colony quote that states, “Technology will change your customers. Customers will change your business.”

Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.

I’m probably not alone among analysts who wrote XMPP off for dead a few years ago after both IBM Lotus and Microsoft announced their commitment to SIP/SIMPLE as the IM/presence protocol of choice, but to steal a line from a favorite movie of geeks all over the world, XMPP is not quite dead.

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Last week I had the opportunity to chat with the folks over at Tungle, a Web 2.0 start-up attacking the problem of scheduling meetings with people outside of your organization.  Today, the typical solution is a whole lot of e-mailing back and forth.  With Tungle, the process is somewhat automated, saving a great deal of time and effort.

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Virtualization is one of the "hotter" topics right now in the IT arena, with a growing number of companies looking at virtualization technologies to reduce application server requirements.  On the desktop front, we’re seeing a growing interest in replacing "fat" desktops with thin-clients using virtualized desktop applications from Microsoft, VMWare, and others. The idea is to reduce the cost of the user desktop in hardware, support, and operational requirements, but also to reduce power consumption by replacing desktop PCs with small footprint thin-client devices

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A few weeks ago I wrote about Broadsoft Xtended, Broadsoft’s effort to open its Broadworks call control platform for hosted telephony services.  Broadsoft’s hope is to allow developers to integrate Broadworks features into their Web 2.0 applications.

Broadsoft appears to have started a trend……………..

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