Today is short notes day, here are three interesting bits and pieces for you to ponder. First, there’s a quick look at the GTD Global Summit, an opportunity to drink the Kool-Aid of productivity, 2.0 style (I am a panelist and have 3 golden tickets — 50% off registrations — to offer, read on to find out how to get one). Second, a thumbnail review of what might be the first “2.0″ business parable, Where in the World is my Team? And finally, a pointer to a rather unique dashboard, since we’ve been on that topic, thanks to Irwin Lazar.

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President Obama won a small victory this week, getting to keep his Blackberry, but it’s not your standard-issue Curve or Storm that will hang from the President’s hip, rather he will use a Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics, and NSA approved at a cost of several thousand dollars. The Obama administration, ripe with 20-somethings, with the first Presidential blog, and masters of Facebook, has also been told that instant messaging is no longer allowed. How can arguably the most important distributed organization in the world function effectively in today’s world with out access to even the most basic collaboration tools? Marc Ambinder notes that Obama’s aides have been advised to use the telephone for important communications. Will they at least have access to a unified communications dashboard that displays availability?

Nortel today declared chapter 11 bankruptcy for its US and Canadian operations (follow the story over on NoJitter.com). Nortel has been around for over 110 years, transforming itself many times over the years. In the last two years, at least on the enterprise side, Nortel has focused on competing with the likes of Cisco as an end-to-end voice & data systems vendor, while differentiating itself via a deep partnership with Microsoft’s UC offerings and a growing partnership with IBM Lotus. More recently Nortel has introduced initiatives in virtual worlds applications and communications-enabled business process platforms.

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That’s the pitch that startup Unison Technologies is making with it’s new free UC client integrating voice, instant messaging, calendaring, and LDAP directory into a single application. The client forces you to view ads, but the company is betting that customers will accept ad-supported software in exchange for not having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for similar features from Microsoft or other. But it doesn’t look like this is going to fly…..

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The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

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… 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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Google today announced voice and video chat capabilities as part of its chat service embedded into Gmail. This is clearly a shot across the bow at Skype, SightSpeed (recently acquired by Logitech) and Oovoo. It’s also a competitive move against Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, as Google continues to evolve it’s mail application into a full blown UC dashboard.

Google’s move is also indicative of what we’re seeing in the enterprise space, as telephony vendors and messaging vendors converge while basing their UC offerings on their relative strengths. Google’s voice/video chat nicely integrates into Gmail, enabling customers to use their Gmail contact list for chat, rather than having to maintain separate buddy lists in different applications. Now, how long before Google repositions Orkut as an alternative to Facebook that is fully integrated into Gmail & chat?

This morning, the big news out of VoiceCon (news on the last day… yay!) was IBM and Microsoft’s promise to achieve true federation between OCS and Sametime. That’s good news for unified communications (although I have to side with the folks who wonder why “federation” is an acceptable solution, when “open-standrads-based interoperability” is really what’s needed). But it’s not news to enterprise 2.0 vendors and users, for whom open, shared access is table stakes. Think about it: When it comes to communication and collaboration, you can’t know in advance who you need to work with; you need to know that at any given time, you can work with anyone you choose.

One of the key ways that UC can benefit an organization is by reducing human latency. The idea is that if you can shorten the time it takes people to find the subject matter experts that they need to solve a particular problem, you can achieve demonstrable benefits such as increased sales, increased customer retention, or greater efficiency of contact center operations.

Most vendors here at VoiceCon San Francisco are spending a lot of time talking up UC as a way to reduce human latency, but few are saying “how” you classify and identify subject matter experts. Typically you hear discussions around grouping people by role, but what is missing is the merging of social computing and UC so that your employees (and perhaps even customers & partners) can self-identify experts based on concepts such as tagging or rating user profiles. It’s not hard to see how a company can integrate something like Lotus Connections or Microsoft SharePoint with Teligent Community server to let your users create the knowledge base that allows individuals to find the experts they need for a given problem.

Aspect has announced that the upcoming GA release of Aspect Unified IP 6.6, scheduled for December 12. The news software will include many new UC-capable features, including integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to support “ask-the-expert” capabilities outside the contact center and within the enterprise itself.

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