IBM Connections - Android Market

IBM® Connections is social software for business. It enables you to build a network of colleagues and subject matter experts, and then leverage that network to further your business goals. With its integrated suite of tools, you can share and discuss ideas, work collaboratively on presentations or proposals, plan and track project tasks, and much more. IBM Connections is a web application that is deployed on a company intranet to promote collaboration within the company. The IBM Connections mobile application extends access to company data to employees who are on the go.

via smarterplanet:

Video interviewing platform simplifies recruitment process

Recruitment processes can be long and inconvenient for both employer and candidate. Whether it’s trawling through piles of applications or organizing hectic diaries and travel arrangements to schedule interviews, California-based Ovia believe their video interviewing platform offers a solution. READ MORE…

via springwise:

LooseCubes Brings Coworking to Anywhere There’s a Desk

Name: LooseCubes

Quick Pitch: LooseCubes is a peer-to-peer marketplace for office space.

Genius Idea: Making coworking possible anywhere there is a desk.

As technology untethers employees from their desks and more people seek a flexible work environment, coworking spaces have popped up in every major city. But that didn’t help LooseCubes founder Campbell McKellar much when she decided to work from a small town in Maine for a summer.

“I kept thinking that there must be someone in this town that has an art studio in their backyard with Wi-Fi,” she says. “And if I could just find them I would never have to go back to a traditional office.”

She founded LooseCubes shortly after she returned to New York City. The startup helps out-of-office workers locate those art studios with Wi-Fi in Maine — or whatever kind of workspace they’re looking for.

Anyone with a free desk can list it on the site. There’s an option to charge rent, but McKeller says that about 37% of the 1,200 listings on the site are offering workspace for free. Some of its users are travelers looking for someplace to work for a day or two. Others are independent workers looking for something more permanent.

The digital economy: Jobs of the future | The Economist

Even the Economist is commenting on the emerging “virtual” economy which is facilitated by the diffusion of Internet access and all the platforms and virtual worlds that provides a global collaboration framework.

It is important to note that this is still in a rather early phase and I would think that we are just entering the first rapid increase of a hype curve. This means that the visions and promises will most likely crash soon. The phenomenon will however not die but pick up in it’s own natural growth pace and most likely become a major disruptive economical phenomenon.

According to the World Bank’s research, gaming-for-hire services alone—such as earning WoW gold to sell on to rich, busy foreigners—was a market worth $3 billion in 2009. As a comparison, the study notes that all the coffee growers in the developing world combined earned just $5.5 billion for their labours. Another growing source of cyberwork is crowdsourcing: for instance, Amazon farmed out the job of eliminating duplicate pages on its e-commerce site to large numbers of casual workers, who got paid a few cents each time they spotted one.

This has developed into a new line of business for Amazon, called Mechanical Turk, which brings together people seeking online piecework with employers looking to farm out tasks. The infoDev report reckons there are now around 100 such online labour exchanges: there’s now a word for them in Chinese, witkey. Some crowdsourced tasks are long and complex, and require special skills. But many are simple and quick, and the software tools needed to perform them are provided for the worker—this sort of task is known as “microwork”.

via futuramb:

(via emergentfutures)

Consumerization of IT: 95% of Information Workers Use Self-Purchased Technology for Work

The consumerization wave of IT which will bypass most IT departments around the globe is picking up speed. Read more about the recent results in this post.

via futuramb:

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Creating a Social Intranet where Employees can Learn, Plan and Do

Source: The Social Workplace

This post is the introduction to a new three part “Learn, Plan and Do” series that explores the use of social technologies to take your intranet to the next level, to create a social intranet. But hopefully you will find that it goes even further.. to not only create a social intranet, but to also introduce your employees to an integrated social experience.

Introducing the Social Intranet

Social media has generated a flurry of organizational buzzwords and catch phrases — collaboration, enterprise 2.0, knowledge share, cloud computing, community, online reputation, social CRM, crowd sourcing… and the list goes on and on. One of the phrases that you hear more and more frequently is actually one that has been around for quite some time: employee engagement. (And one that is very near and dear to my heart.) With this renewed focus on engagement, organizations are now assessing how they can leverage social technologies to engage their most important audience, employees. And where better than the your company intranet? The corporate intranet is (or should be) the hub of all employee activity and transactions; where employees go to manage money, career, life events, and health. Taking your intranet to the next level means using social technologies to not only enhance the every day activities and transactions necessary for employees to learn, plan and do their jobs; thereby making them more efficient, engaged and productive: a social intranet.