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Google Wave, the maddeningly confusing yet highly innovative real-time collaboration tool, will become a member of Google's online office suite Google Apps later this year. The service, still in closed beta, is meant to be a modern-day revamp of email - what email would be if it was invented in 2009 instead of the 1960's. Yet the interface, a mashup of email, chat, and collaborative document editing, left many early adopters with mixed feelings about the product...at least in its current form. Called "unproductive," "complex," and "overwhelming" by the same people who usually embrace new technologies, it seems an odd choice to add the still-developing Wave service to the Google Apps line-up at this time. But Google has confirmed they will do exactly that.

Xobni, the Outlook plugin that reveals the hidden social network in your inbox, has today launched a business service called Xobni Enterprise. With this, I.T. administrators are being given new tools to deploy and manage the plugin across corporate desktops. In addition, the company is offering customizable extensions for popular enterprise systems including Salesforce CRM, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, and others. It can even tap into a company's own information store saved in an LDAP database like Microsoft's Active Directory or it can pull from other internal websites.

An independent study by Equation Research found that today's consumers are disappointed with the performance of the mobile web. Despite the proliferation of smartphones with their full-featured web browsers, the majority of mobile web surfers have encountered issues with accessing websites via their handsets over the past year. The number one issue reported involves websites that are too slow to load, frustrating users to the point that over half said they would never return to the site in question.

New from Sweb Apps, the company whose online service lets anyone create their own iPhone application - no coding required - is Sweb Apps 2.0, the next generation of the company's app builder product. Among a handful of new features, including a real-time WYSIWYG-style landing page builder and YouTube integration, is the ability to create an iPhone-based store where you can sell inventory within your app and take payments via PayPal.

In a surprisingly candid post on Spotify's blog, company co-founder Daniel Ek recently shared his thoughts about where the popular streaming music company stands today and where he hopes it can go in the future. The main point of his post was to clarify that Spotify, despite being a media darling these days, is nowhere near becoming a sustainable company with a stable revenue model. However, that's their end goal, Ek says, and they're in it "for the long haul" with no intention of simply "flipping" the company after the hype reaches its crescendo. But in the meantime, the company struggles with the exorbitant per-play fees enforced by the music industry while not finding success with an ad-supported model.

Looking for a more affordable and more stable hosted email service than Gmail? According to Lotus, that's exactly what their new hosted email system called iNotes can provide. The company isn't being subtle about their desire to compete head-on with the Internet giant, either. Says Sean Poulley, an IBM executive overseeing the new service, "Google has shown itself to be weak. There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service."

Should Google be worried? Some analysts think so. "This is trouble for Google," said Matthew Cain of Gartner. Google of course, disagrees.

It's often hard to tell the marketing experts from the impostors. Being a thought leader isn't about knowing the best buzzwords and having a PowerPoint ready to deploy, it's about being among the first to execute a great idea. Google and The Wharton School have teamed up to provide users with 100 marketing-related videos on how to build community and customer bases in the digital landscape. The Fast.Forward. Channel shows communications professionals how they can evolve to cut through the noise and spam, and build loyal audiences with tech savvy people like us.

A company called Sweb Apps has just launched a new service which lets anyone build iPhone apps, even if you don't have a technical background. The service is aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses who don't have an in-house or on-call engineering team capable of developing mobile applications. Instead, using the Sweb Apps website, business owners can create their own iPhone application themselves in as little as five minutes, says the company.

It seems we're always going back and forth on the subject of Facebook's usefulness at work. Some would argue that Facebook is no longer just a time-wasting application for poking people and throwing sheep - it's a critical part of their daily communications with co-workers, colleagues, and others within their industry. In fact, earlier this month, we reported on a study that showed the growing acceptance of social networking applications in the workplace. The study noted that nearly half of I.T. professionals now saw Facebook as one of the apps that had business value.

Yet today, there's new information being released that seems to say something different about the state of social networking applications in the workplace. According to Nucleus Research, Facebook causes a 1.5% decrease in employee productivity.

The iPhone is clearly making some inroads in the business world, and RoamBi, which launched today, is one of the many new companies that is trying to win over some of these business customers. RoamBi's mission is to make spreadsheets readable and browsable on the iPhone (iTunes link), and its designers have done a great job at turning dry and unreadable spreadsheets into highly useful interactive mini-apps. These 'apps' allow users to visualize their data on the small iPhone screen, where they would otherwise be squinting at columns full of unreadable numbers.

Forrester Research CEO, George Colony, writes a blog where he helps other CEOs understand how business and technology intersect. His most recent post compared social media to sex, a comparison that may have you giggling at first, but is actually a pretty apt way of describing what it's like to delve into the social realm.

At the OMMA Mobile conference on Wednesday, Jim McDonnell, marketing manager, emerging channels for Papa John's International, shared some bad news about the potential for mobile applications associated with a business. In short, he basically called the Papa John's iPhone app a dud, saying that the company hasn't "seen anything that really delivers for us as well as mobile display advertising," and based on the numbers, the company has decided not to expand to other mobile platforms.

Oh no! The iPhone doesn't deliver? Businesses take heed? Well, that's what it sounds like. Except there's just one small problem here: Papa John's doesn't have an iPhone app - they have a mobile website.

Social networks are becoming a default way for many employees to stay in touch with friends, colleagues, and business associates, but according to a new poll by the anti-virus firm Sophos, 63% of system administrators worry that employees who share too much personal information on social networking sites will put their company's IT infrastructure at risk. A quarter of these businesses also report that they have been the victim of spam, phishing, and malware attacks via sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

Over the last few weeks, Facebook has been rolling out its latest redesign. Within days of the first changes, a polling application on Facebook showed that 94% of the 634,484 users who took the poll hate the redesign, and some 1.7 million users signed a petition to bring back the old design.

Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and Social Media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

"From paper cards to email contacts." This is Part Two of a two-part post. The first part is here.

As noted earlier, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test this past week at the DEMO conference. While I found a somewhat workable solution for sending out my contact info to others, I still collected a large stack of paper business cards from the people I met. These cards had to be digitized in order for them to be of any use to me. While people with administrative assistants are fortunate to have this tiresome data entry process handled for them, those of us without are stuck doing it ourselves. We can either sit at the keyboard for hours or use a scanner. Shouldn't there be a better way?

Hint: They're Using iPhone Apps

The newspaper industry is in a downward death spiral, having been severely impacted by new technologies, the ubiquity of internet access, and a rise in citizen journalism. Here in the U.S., some papers are filing for bankruptcy, others are close to doing the same, and there's even a proposal to give the newspaper industry a bailout plan of its own. Elsewhere in the world, it's more of the same. In Japan though, the country's high population of elderly citizens is keeping the papers afloat...for now, at least. But like everywhere else, they will soon have to face the future: young people don't do newsprint.

Two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha, a former Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server strategist, and Alex DeNeui, also a SQL strategist, are attempting to do what (so far) Microsoft has not: compete head-on with Google Docs by transforming Microsoft Office into online collaboration suite. To do so, they've launched a company called DocVerse, an early-stage startup that aims to simply document sharing and collaboration.

A funny thing happened on the way to the airport. I searched through the iTunes App Store on my iPhone for a Southwest app that allowed for flight check-ins, only to find that it didn't exist. I don't know why I expected it to be there, but I did. Southwest is one of those companies that seems so "with it" when it comes to this digital age we live in. They have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a flickr account, and a YouTube channel. So why no iPhone app?

A couple of entrepreneurs out of Kerala, India, are re-envisioning the way that banking is done. Anish Achuthan (26) and Rameena Rabeedin (28), have developed a branchless network consisting of low-cost ATMs, Smart Teller Machines, E-POS terminals, and a mobile banking gateway that lets you perform transactions using your cell phone. The end result of their efforts brings modern banking technologies to semi-urban and rural markets where traditional banks are unwilling or unable to set up ATMs.

VMware Brings Virtualization to Mobile Phones

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.