Posting here after a long time. Looks like E 2.0 Boston was a big success; wish I could have attended.

I thought the E 2.0 gang would appreciate a pointer to a new book by Rob Salkowitz, Young World Rising, where he examines the bottom-up revolution being created by young entrepreneurs in parts of the world with a young and growing working-age population. I have previously talked about Rob and his work on the interplay of demographics, generational effects and 2.0 technologies (in my SM vs. KM post, and in my review of Rob’s previous book, co-authored with Dan Rasmus). This is easily his best work so far.

I posted an interview with Rob on the Trailmeme blog, with links to the book. Rob shared some fascinating views on technology and demographics, and I have included a brief introduction to his work for those who are new to this important subject. Check it out.

Unified Communications/Audio-equipment maker Plantronics is running a contest with a prize bundle worth $1400 for the most creative photograph showcasing how you work. The  Show Us How You Work To Win! contest can win you a collection of “office of the future” goodies including cool headphones, an iPhone, and not one, but TWO netbooks. So go on ahead and enter. I am a judge for this year’s contest, and as some of you may recall, the winner of last year’s Plantronics Telewho contest, so I can assure there really is a nice big prize here. Here’s an example of the sort of picture they are looking for. I am sure you guys can top this one though!

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco 2009 just ended and was a huge success!  Thanks to all who attended, all of our speakers and exhibitors, and all of the Enterprise 2.0 staff.  Now it’s time to think about Enterprise 2.0 Boston!  The Call for Papers for E2 Boston 2010 is open now through Friday, December 18^th.   This year we’ve partnered with Spigit, Inc. to create a brand new Call for Papers submissions, collaboration and voting experience in the true spirit of Enterprise 2.0.

You’ll find all of the following information about how to submit on the Call for Papers site but here’s some important items to remember.

First off, you’ll need to sign in and create an account to either make or review a submission. Submissions can be tagged with one of our pre-populated technology topics or a unique topic of the submitter’s choice. Technology areas include:

• Strategy, Planning and Execution
• Driving Adoption and Organizational Change
• Social Tools and Applications for the Enterprise
• Case Studies
• Technology Foundations of Enterprise 2.0
• Social Tools and Applications for the SMB
• Social Media, Marketing and Customer Engagement

The form requires the usual information including a title, description, session format, and all pertinent speaker information. But this time around, all submissions made will be immediately viewable on a discussion forum, allowing for increased transparency in the Call for Papers process.

We encourage all who submit, all who plan on attending Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston, and anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0, to review the submissions, and give us feedback. Submitters will be allowed to edit their submissions based on this feedback, and can also attach files with supporting materials to submissions. Inviting friends/colleagues to view submissions and publishing your submission to a variety of social networks is also made easy. Lastly, submissions are searchable by technology area, keyword or speaker.

The feedback of the community will be the primary criteria for selecting the sessions for Boston 2010.  In addition to the wisdom of the crowd, creation of a balanced program for the different Technology Areas will be considered.

There are three stages defining the selection process:

Proposal Collection: This is the opening stage. All proposals start in this stage.  Community feedback is encouraged.

Community Vote: This is the second stage. After the Call for Papers closes on December 18^th, the official voting period will begin in January 2010. Proposals will advance to the voting stage when they achieve certain levels of community feedback and approval.

Selected Sessions: This will be the final stage. Advancing here is based on community votes and the approval of members of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Advisory Board. Proposals with the most votes will be part of the E2 Boston 2010 Conference.

We want the Enterprise 2.0 community to collaborate, give us their most exciting ideas and experiences, and tell us what they want to see in Boston next year.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact mfarrell@techweb.com or (415) 947-6250.  We’re looking forward to reading your submissions and cultivating a meaningful discussion around the experiences and ideas that are the future of Enterprise 2.0.

I’ve been spending some time lately with social business and collaboration consultants, Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel, discussing where we’re headed with the Enterprise 2.0 industry and the role the Enterprise 2.0 Conference plays as a catalyst for this market. Oliver and Sameer spend their days helping companies - large companies - understand how best to leverage social and collaborative tools.  But what I find refreshing in our conversations is that they move very quickly to focus on what we’re trying to achieve with these technologies and strategies.  How are we utilizing Enterprise 2.0 to achieve demonstrable and measurable results?

As an industry we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the merits of social and web 2.0 tools in business.  That’s been an important part of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation as I firmly believe that the disparity between consumer technology and business technology has largely fueled the Enterprise 2.0 market.

At our Boston conference I heard time and time again, “it’s not about the tools, it’s about adoption.”  The burning question was how to change the business culture to better utilize these tools. There’s no question that culture and adoption play a massive role in being successful with Enterprise 2.0 but there’s more to this.

What many Enterprise 2.0 experts and practitioners fail to recognize are the end results they are trying to achieve.   Yes, replacing the corporate intranet with a wiki is generally a major step forward for businesses. But the promise of Enterprise 2.0 goes far beyond that, into functional areas within the organization that can also benefit from the underlying framework, strategies and tools that comprise Enterprise 2.0.  That’s where the real value lies and that’s also the trickiest part to fully understand, dissect and integrate with an enterprise-wide strategy.

With Oliver and Sameer’s help and guidance, our San Francisco conference is going to tackle this challenge through a series of sessions and half-day intensive workshop that Oliver and Sameer will co-chair. The workshop will address how to build a business case for enterprise-scale performance acceleration - a must attend program for anyone tasked with driving a company-wide Enterprise 2.0 strategy.  The breakout sessions will look at how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy can unlock value in specific functions within business including; business partner networks; customer support and collaboration networks.

Oliver and Sameer are putting tremendous effort into this program to provide attendees with actionable information and best practices. We hope to build on this program at future events so please let us know how this resonates with your interests or suggest topics you’d like them to address:

@olivermarks

@sameerpatel

@swylie650

Further discussion on this topic from Oliver and Sameer:

Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships - Pretzel Logic

How To Sell Collaborative Business Performance Internally - ZDNet

Today was an interesting day in the Enterprise 2.0 echo chamber that reminded me of my favorite short poem by Robert Frost,

“We all dance around the circle and suppose. The secret sits in the middle and knows.”

A spirited debate erupted this morning in the blogosphere and on Twitter whether the Enterprise 2.0 meme should be retired in favor of the newly popular Social Business meme. The best quote I heard all day was from Megan Murray at Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm that won this year’s Open Enterprise 2009 case study . Ms. Murray wrote,

“In the end I’m not concerned with what we call it. I’ve got work to do.”

The secret, in this case, is that there are millions of enterprise professionals around the world that simply are not tuned into this hair-splitting debate. Whether we’d like to admit it to ourselves or not, large organizations are predominantly still hierarchical fiefdoms. Worse? Senior management and executives still make the big, expensive decisions on strategy and execution. We can continue to debate all the nuances of what Enterprise 2.0 is or isn’t or if it should be at all, but in the end, the good news about enterprise-wide collaboration and “social” innovation will be told and sold in small, leather-chaired conference rooms around the world. And, my prediction is that it will be told and sold by top drawer management consultants like Tammy Erickson.

Tammy is both a McKinsey Award-winning author and executive speaker. As President of nGenera Insight, she has conducted ground-breaking, extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles and the books Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. Her blog, Across the Ages, was one of the first Harvard Business Publishing Discussion Forum blogs. You can also find her blogging at Huffington Post.

I was the board member who nominated Tammy to open the conference this year in San Francisco. My position for supporting Tammy was rooted in the need to elevate the conversation of enterprise transformation to a senior management/executive level. Although we had many other good candidates, I felt Tammy was unique in her ability to raise the conversation to a more strategic level and connect the dots to business value. I hope you welcome her to our community.

And, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that Tammy is, well, female. Our old friend Tom Davenport, who originally pooh-poohed the Enterprise 2.0 meme, gives Tammy a ringing endorsement. I have had the pleasure of seeing Tammy speak to executive audiences; she rocks the house. I hope our tight-knit e20 community will be as delighted. I’ve already cautioned her not to call “it” by name.

So here we are just a couple weeks away from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  We have been working for eight-plus months on the agenda and we are ready for a great event.  Personally, I’m just ready to get to Boston and hear from all the great speakers we have lined up! Like Stowe, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ulrike Reinhold about Enterprise 2.0 and cover some of our highlights and goals for the upcoming conference.  There are a lot of great programs at this year’s event that didn’t get a chance to cover in the interview. So here are some of the important links to check out our program:

• Keynotes and General Sessions
• The entire agenda by day
• Enterprise2Open (the unconference portion of the agenda)
• Evening in the Cloud
• LaunchPad
• Open Enterprise 2009 (research project and innovation award)

The truly unique characteristics of Twitter are its simplicity and lack of specific purpose or application. Twitter is merely a digital conversation; albeit one that’s constrained to short statements of 140 characters or less. Like any conversation, you choose to talk to one other person at a time or broadcast out to many. You can make your conversations private or public. You can choose to blather, or to comment on everything from walking your dog to world affairs. You can follow and share your thoughts with thousands of people or you can offer your attention to a select few.  As with any live conversation, contribute something particularly witty, funny or unique and your comment could be repeated to millions of users by Twitter’s digital word of mouth, also known as a re-tweet. At its core, Twitter is just a platform for simple conversation and that’s what makes it unique.

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Breaking from the video format of other posts we recorded audio of a three way conversation. With George Athannassov based in Colorado, David Terrar in the UK, their core programming team in Bulgaria and a client base spread across the planet, WordFrame are a very international company. Terrar is Executive Director and one of the shareholders, and the company is owned by George and other members of the team with no outside investors. The company has been bootstrapped from the start and lives off revenues generated from their existing customers.

Listen to the interview.

At this week’s VoiceCon conference I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion featuring Cisco VP & CTO of UC, Joe Burton, and IBM Lotus UC and Collaboration Services U.S. Leader Peter Fay on the role of Web 2.0 in an enterprise UC architecture.

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The SIP working group within the ITEF has just published an Internet Draft describing SIP’s vulnerability to relay attack and some possible mitigations. The attack method is via a “man-in-the-middle” approach whereby the attacker inserts himself in between the victim and their outbound proxy server, and initiates a session with the victim.

Given SIP’s role as the common protocol within a unified communications architecture, it’s important to be aware of security threats, especially as organizations widen their adoption of SIP-to-SIP extranet connectivity and SIP trunking for PSTN access.