Enterprise 2.0 Magic Quadrant released

Socialtext has published the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise 2.0. In this context, I think that Enterprise 2.0 is focused primarily on the “traditional” blogs, wikis and related tools that have been associated with Web 2.0. No leaders in this space yet according to Gartner- mostly niche players and visionaries with a couple of well established “challengers” (including Microsoft) on the rise.

Is Apple inviting a lawsuit?

According to Engadget, Apple is refusing to take cash for iPhone purchases. They claim that you have to pay by debit or credit card, even though the service activation doesn’t occur in the store. This move is apparently designed to prevent illegal resellers from hoarding the phones and unlocking them for new customers. Can a company like Apple legally refuse cash? Seems like the next likely lawsuit in the whole Apple iPhone saga.

UPDATE- It appears that Apple is also refusing to take their own gift cards for iPhones. Terrible customer relations if you ask me.

When will Google’s “Hailstorm” come?

A new article in the New York Times discusses the privacy concerns raised by Google’s acquisition of Jaiku. In fact, Nick Carr pointed out a specific quote on his blog tonight from Jaiku’s founder about the “illusion of privacy” held by most people using the Internet. While this quote may prove to be unfortunate from a PR perspective, the question that this raises is when will Internet users start to view Google more skeptically based on their growing base of applications and treasure trove of user data that comes from use of GMail, user search behavior, and many other interactions with the Google “service cloud”.

This situation reminds me of Microsoft’s Hailstorm initiative. As Scoble predicted two years ago, it is just a matter of time before Google recreates their own Hailstorm. The concept of Hailstorm wasn’t a bad one, but the concerns around platform and data “lock-in” threw users into an uproar when Microsoft introduced the concept nearly 6 years ago. Today, I wonder if/when users will reach a similar level of outrage against Google as their services continue to evolve and more data is owned by Google’s infrastructure.

NYT fluff piece on 20% time- Is this really news?

The New York Times has a fluff piece on Google’s “20% time” this weekend. While this concept of “slack” time isn’t new in our industry (remember Tom DeMarco anyone?), it definitely isn’t new at Google. Joe Beda, a former Microsoft engineer, wrote extensively about 20% time in March of 2005. The Official Google Blog has included multiple mentions of 20% time, including one back in May of 2006 related to keyboard shortcuts in GMail. So how is this news? I think the answer is that it isn’t.

Space Elevator Teams Compete for NASA Prizes

A pretty cool story on space elevators over at Slashdot- it seems like we’re still so far away from this being reality. I can’t wait to see it.