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Paul Greenberg's engaging experiment in highlighting CRM vendors from around the world has concluded today, with the announcement of the winners of his CRM Idol contest. You can view the finalist entries on his website here. There were entries from all over the world, and today two finalists were announced.

As Brian Williams of NBC News is fond of saying, the news begins now. If you are looking for cool CRM apps from smaller companies that don't necessarily have the talent to show off their goods, Paul Greenberg's labor of love (which we covered earlier this year here), began last week with dozens of apps posted to the judging website here.

LinkedIn is considering building a social networking tool for the workplace, along the lines of Yammer and similar tools, CEO Jeff Weiner said in the company's first earnings call earlier today.

If it does so, LinkedIn will be competing with dozens of other companies, including IBM, Jive, Microsoft (which has some social networking capabilities built into SharePoint), Socialtext TIBCO and VMware (which recently acquired SocialCast). And as we've mentioned, some see Google Plus eventually being a workplace tool as part of Google Apps.

With so many options already on the market, are you interested in the idea of using LinkedIn as an internal social network?

About 20% of information workers report that they have conducted work-related activities from a mobile device while driving. That's just one of the findings reported in a Unisys and IDC survey on the consumerization of the enterprise, released today. The survey has a number of expected findings - employees are using their own devices for work, IT sees mobile support as a priority, etc.

But the survey also puts some numbers on the current "always on" nature of work in the post-PC era.

Socialcast (which was recently acquired by ReadWriteWeb sponsor VMware) ran an interesting infographic these week visualizing, among other things, a social media study conducted by the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the use of social media in Fortune 500 companies (we covered part of this study back in 2008).

The majority of companies studied found social media - such as blogging, social networking and online video - to be successful. Even as far back 2007 (why does that seem like so long ago?), a majority of the companies surveyed found social media to be at least somewhat important.

VMware announced today that it will acquire Socialcast, an enterprise microblogging and social network software-as-a-service. The move expands VMware's software-as-a-service portfolio, which also includes Zimbra, Mozy and SlideRocket. VMware is owned by EMC.

Moxie, an enterprise social network platform, released an iPhone app for its Moxie Employee Spaces app today.

Moxie started life as nGenera, but changed its name last year. The company invests heavily in usability research, and hopes its products will become the most user-friendly social media applications. Moxie offers both customer facing and employee facing software, and has a history of providing consulting services. Employee Spaces is its offering for internal social media.

Paul Greenberg announced this week a fun new project called CRM Idol that will have 60 small CRM-related companies go up in front of a panel of judges and be reviewed.

The problem Greenberg outlines is one that we're familiar with here at ReadWriteWeb: bloggers, journalists, analysts, venture capitalists, etc. are inundated with pitches from small companies. Many of these companies could be great, but there are too many to sift through. This will help get some of these companies in front of a larger audience.

eXo offers an open source Java framework for enterprise social software tools. It includes reusable components for building content management systems, user management tools, activity streams, e-mail integrations, mashups and more.

This week it announced Cloud IDE, a Web-based development environment for cloud applications.

In its own words, Buddy Media offers "power tools for Facebook." Its service is, in essence, a content management system for Facebook geared towards the needs of large organizations. For example, Starwood Hotels uses Buddy Media to manage Facebook pages for its hotel chains. Each individual hotel can have its own Facebook page, and all the pages for the brand can be centrally managed.

Other companies using Buddy media in ABC, Johnson & Johnson and Target. According to Joe Ciarallo, director of communications at Buddy Media,seven of the 10 biggest brands in terms of advertising spending are Buddy Media clients. Last week, it won the Crunchie for best enterprise startup of the 2011.