I recently interviewed Curtiss Pope, Founder and CEO of AisleFinder, a company that makes the signs at the top of each aisle in the supermarket irrelevant. With applications available for iOS, and now Android, and a database of over 3,000 stores and 150,000 products in the U.S., the "Google Maps of Supermarkets," as its founder calls it, saves time, and in the blisteringly fast app market, provides a service that hasn't been done before - or at least not properly.

During our interview, we spoke about his experience with the NewMe Accelerator, building a start-up in Silicon Valley as an African-American, the Michael Arrington/Soledad O'Brien situation, and how AisleFinder came to be.

While thus far, there's general consensus that Tim Cook is doing, and may continue to do, a fine job at Apple stepping into the shoes of his lauded predecessor, Steve Jobs, there looms a bigger issue. There appears to be, at least in the public conscience, a lack of leadership and direction from the chief executives of corporations, including tech firms. And in fact, 2011 may be characterized as a year of misdirection from the head office.

Is this actually a problem; do Americans and Canadians actually need a CEO they can look up to? Or are CEOs typically glorified by virtue of a lack of deserving leaders in the public space? This American reporter discussed these questions with our favorite Canadian contributor, CTV News Channel analyst Carmi Levy.

Yesterday the news about Oracle acquiring Fatwire motivated me to reconnect with Fatwire's CEO, Yogesh Gupta.

Gupta is an interesting guy on several levels. First, he has been around tech for quite some time and can play in the major leagues. This is the second time that a company of his has been acquired by a big software firm (CA, which used to be called Computer Associates, was the first). Second, he has an amazing depth of understanding about both business and technologies. Spending time on his customers' extensive websites means he stays current with trends too.

A central figure in the famous Wikileaks/Manning "cablegate" case from last year is Adrian Lamo, the "homeless hacker" who snitched on Manning to the feds and led to the latter's imprisonment. I first met Lamo about ten years ago, when he surprisingly took me up on an offer to spend the night in my New York apartment and come in to talk to a high school networking class I was teaching at the time. (He was called the homeless hacker because he didn't have a fixed address, not because he was living on the streets.)

It used to be that there was not much to talk about when it came to content management.

How times have changed. The advent of modern Web apps, social network and changing demographics are just a few of the factors that are causing disruptions that are changing the nature of the stodgiest of applications.

Alfresco Software Chairman John Newton is pounding on this theme. He does not talk about disruption but he does see a change to what he calls a system of engagement.

The way we view the enterprise is changing all at once. We view technologies differently due to a number of factors.

At the base of all this change is one constant. And that's content. It all needs to be managed in some way. Content is a central issue in the enterprise. It's becoming as important for management as any core function.

Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler's new book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, a follow-up to Bernoff's and Charlene Li's 2008 Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, was released today. Empowered takes a look at several trends we've been following at ReadWriteEnterprise, including Shadow IT, innovation managment and microblogging. We caught up with Bernoff to talk about the new book.

Yammer came to the market with one of the first microblogging services. In the span of their existence, a number of companies launched their own versions of an activity stream. But Yammer looks like they have the customers to prove they have a hold on their sector of the market.

At the IBM Information on Demand conference, we asked Robert Ashe to sketch how he sees integration between the company's business intelligence and collaboration technologies. What he shows is how business intelligence applications and Lotus products could connect business users through mashups and social interactions.

He is a general manager at IBM and leads the company's Business Intelligence and Performance Management efforts. He was CEO at Cognos before the company was acquired by IBM in 2007.

IBM is developing analytics platforms to help companies better understand how multiple pieces of information fit together to create rich forms of business intelligence.

We sat down today at the IBM Information on Demand Conference with Jeff Jonas, one of IBM's chief scientists to get a picture of the types of analysis they see emerging for users.