In 2006 there were 750 million virtual workers globally.  By 2011 that number is expected to reach 1billion people and roughly 3/4 of the U.S. workforce.  Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski, Chief Executive Officer of Virtual Distance International sited those numbers during a recent BusinessWeek webcast that also featured Enterprise 2.0 Conference adviser and NetAge CEO, Jessica Lipnack.  The webcast topic: “Boosting Productivity through Virtual Collaboration” is something Jessica covers extensively at NetAge and is a huge theme for us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

It’s no surprise to see the use of virtual technologies increasing, especially during difficult times where companies are desperate to cut costs.  In fact, BusinessWeek conducted a live poll during the webcast and found that 48% of the audience were already using virtual collaboration daily while 32% used it weekly and 10% monthly.  Certainly “virtual collaboration” can be defined pretty broadly to include everything from the company wiki to a conference bridge but the point remains that what was already an increasing trend in business will be accelerated by our current economic woes.

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The cellphone industry has seen phenomenal growth over the years. There are over 6 billion people on Earth that own mobile phones for both personal and professional use. But at what point does this market’s growth taper off? Exponential growth year over year is not sustainable, and some of the recent earnings statements are highlighting the growth’s end is near.

Motorola recently announced their 4th quarter earnings and sales were $7.14 billion, down 26 percent from $9.65 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. One could point the finger of blame at the economy, but perhaps a bigger issue is at hand: market saturation.

Smart phones enable a new way of communication beyond voice. The Web and SMS are now part of the cellular industry and remain an integral way to exchange data. New data applications will create new revenue streams for the industry, but the explosive growth we’ve seen the last 5 years is slowing down. Handset manufacturers can’t rely on consumers and enterprise users to continually upgrade to a more expensive model.

For more insight into this downturn, take a peek at this New York Times article.

I posted last month about the prospect of new phone companies seeking to leverage the Android platform, and it looks like we won’t have to wait much longer, as the Open Handset Alliance just announced 14 new members, including major vendors like Sony Ericsson and Vodafone.

Each new member must contribute significantly towards the advancement of the Android platform. This can manifest itself in different ways. Per the recent press release:

New members will either deploy compatible Android devices, contribute significant code to the Android Open Source Project, or support the ecosystem through products and services that will accelerate the availability of Android-based devices. With these commitments, the Open Handset Alliance will continue to drive greater and faster innovation for the benefit of mobile users and everyone in the industry.

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The NY Times reports this morning that President-Elect Obama will likely be forced to give up his BlackBerry, which he relies on for both voice and e-mail communications. They note that he hopes to at least have a laptop on his desk, becoming the first President to have a computer in the oval office though his staff prepares clippings for him so he doesn’t spend his day reading news sites and blogs.

It’s simply unimaginable what it would be like to work without a computer in today’s day and age, especially when one is shielded from being able to use the Internet to seek out their own sources of information. We wonder why our political leaders are so isolated from the “real world” and here we are denying the leader of the free world access to the most important tool for unfiltered information gathering of this age. Hopefully President Obama will be able to find a way to stay connected in cyber-space despite the concerns over FOIA and potential subpeonas.

… I’ve been pleasantly surprised and equally disappointed. Here’s a list of some of the things I love, and some of things I really don’t love about the first phone to utilize the Android OS .

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Melanie Turek posted a piece last week, on a contest sponsored by Plantronics, inviting submission of terms to replace “telecommuter.”

Never one to pass up an opportunity to win nice goodies for a single word, I threw “cloudworker” into the hat. I hope the term is evocative enough that you get the reasoning behind it without much explanation. Anyway, the process of coming up with that term (5 minutes of private brainstorming) sparked a whole interesting train of thought, which I just captured in a post on my blog, The Cloudworker’s Creed.

Here is a picture and a little extract. Do check out the article and weigh in on the merits of my pen-portrait of the archetypal information worker of the future. I’ll be writing a fair number of follow-up posts in a series.

The cloudworker is the prototypical information worker of tomorrow. He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof. The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career. Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work and full, untethered-to-health-insurance free agency.

Go to the full article.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

Siemens Enterprised Communications has annnounced its mobile UC client for Blackberry, Simbian and Windows Mobile Device users. Unlike other solutions that purport to be “mobile UC,” but which really deliver only fixed-mobile convergence, OpenScape Mobility offers users all UC capabilities from their mobile devices. Whether they take advantage of mobile video and web conferencing remains to be seen, but presence, chat and telephony are key capabilities in the mobile UC world.

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IBM announced Lotus iNotes this week, bringing Notes calendar, e-mail, and address book access to iPhone. It looks like this approach is based more on providing a stand-alone iPhone app rather than synching the iPhone’s own apps with Domino as is possible using Microsoft ActiveSync with Exchange. Still, this just knocked down another argument for using the iPhone in the corporate environment, especially when the cost of an iPhone is on par with most BlackBerry’s. But IT architects need to understand the impact on their server and network environments of enabling their remote users to sync directly with messaging servers versus using a hosted proxy in the RIM/Good models.

Unless you have been hiding under a proverbial rock, you know that T-Mobile and Google finally outed what has to be the worst kept secret in product launch history the Android-based phone from HTC, aka G1. You can find pretty comprehensive discussions of the G1 speeds and feeds here and here.

The overall attitude of being “underwhelmed” by the G1 misses the larger motivation for Google to even get into the mobile space - which is to extend their search and advertising empire to the next inevitable frontier.

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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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