Public sector CIOs need to use Facebook and Twitter because they serve social media users, according to CIO Barry Condry.

The world’s first computer animation was programmed in Fortran almost 50 years ago.

Still clinging to that old 2G Motorola Razr phone? Time to upgrade. AT&T is planning to shut down the 2G network by 2017.

Curiosity, the NASA Mars science lab, has touched down on the red planet last night. Already there are fresh high res images of the Martian landscape. Fascinating!

As expected, post-IPO Facebook is experiencing massive braindrain with many of its movers and shakers cutting and running. More alarming is the news that insiders are ditching their Facebook stock.

Have you read any of the Malcolm Gladwell books on business success? If so, you may enjoy Zach Weinersmith’s tips on how to write Malcolm Gladwell books yourself.

Last month, Phil Simon wrote about the green facets of 3D printing. Now take a look at the human element — this 3D printer gave a disabled girl magic arms.

The CIO need to be the “cheerleader” of the community, according to the city of Seattle’s social CTO Bill Schrier.

Part of the social media users’ strategy is to become more visible, something this blogger feels CIOs struggle to accomplish within the organization.

CIOs are leaders in determining the direction of a business. When the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) aimed to produce a zero-carbon, zero-waste event using energy-efficient technology, Gerry Pennell, CIO of the London summer games, used his IT expertise to help make the London summer games the greenest games ever.

Pennell deployed a combination of green IT technologies including piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity occurs when pressure is applied to an object — a negative charge is produced on one side and a positive charge is produced on the other. Once pressure is relieved, electrical currents flow. Twelve 17.7″ X 23.6″ energy floor tiles lead visitors to Olympic Park. The kinetic energy harvested from over 12 million foot impressions will illuminate central LED floodlights 24 hours a day. This produces 2.1 watts of electricity per hour. The extra renewable energy is then stored in a lithium polymer battery for up to three days. It’s also sent via transmitter to power local street lights, displays and other off-grid applications.

On the surface, it sounds like one of those inventions that seems so simple in a “why didn’t I think of that?” kind of way. If someone told me I could step on a piece of rubber and generate light for three days, I never would have believed them. Now just imagine if all sidewalks, paths, corridors and floor spaces were constructed of piezoelectric tiles. This trending technology could be the key to helping CIOs run an energy-efficient and sustainable business. For example, the energy created from swivel chairs constantly rolling across piezoelectric tiles could operate low-power applications in offices. On a grand scale, a CIO could run an entire energy-savings system from the foot traffic of company employees.

These special rubber piezoelectric tiles are the handiwork of young London brainiac Laurence Kemball-Cook’s Pavegen Systems. The tiles are a great low-carbon solution. They are waterproof, last up to five years and are made from recycled trunk tires and some marine grade steel.

Kemball-Cook has installed his tiles as a dance floor at the music festival Bestival in Isle of Wright, England. Currently, he has 30 permanent installations in schools, shopping malls, city squares and now the 2012 London summer games. However, the piezoelectric device’s hybrid formula is a secret. Even the price per tile is kept a mystery. Kemball-Cook eventually wants to make his tiles practical for the real world and affordable to smaller markets.

Piezoelectricity isn’t a new concept.  The East Japan Railway Company in Japan experimented with piezoelectric flooring since 2006 at its main station. In 2010, the city of Toulouse, France, installed piezoelectric tiles in sidewalks to generate its street lamps. Israeli company Innowattech tested piezoelectricity on railroad tracks and highways.

While many of these examples come from organizations with deep pockets, smaller companies are employing piezoelectric technology today. For instance, some dance clubs capture the energy on a dance floor and use it to power LED lights.

CIOs drive an organization’s performance and end results, so it’s mission-critical for CIOs to be as engaged as possible with all aspects of the company, including the human element. Piezoelectricity might just be the green way for CIOs to involve employees in IT.

For instance, in my own work life, I’m in my own mindset at my desk. I sometimes forget that I work alongside a durable IT team. With piezoelectric flooring, I might feel more included in my company and the behind-the-scenes operations. There would no longer be an invisible shield between employees and the IT team. Transmitters connected to piezoelectric floor tiles could charge our office printers and power ceiling lights. Knowing that just walking from my desk to the break room could generate electricity would bring all the departments together. And, with that, midmarket CIOs could be one step closer to not only a more tightly knit company, but a smaller carbon footprint.

Miki Onwudinjo is a TechTarget editorial assistant and a journalism student at Northeastern University in Boston.

CIOs looking to harness the power of talent retention should look no further than Apple’s low-paid workers. Wait, something doesn’t sound right about that plan.

Got a BlackBerry? You’re quickly becoming an endangered user.

Did you think Dell had slowed down with the buyouts? Silly reader. Dell is acquiring Quest Software this week.

CIOs got heart, too. Check out the CIO Scholarship Fund event to help future IT leaders with tuition.

The leap second caused outages on many sites over the weekend, like Reddit, BuzzFeed, Gawker, LinkedIn and Yelp, plus scores of Linux sites. Bad news for lovers of cloud computing services. You’ll be happy to know that the TechTarget network was just fine.

And if the leap second wasn’t bad enough, real storm clouds knocked out Amazon’s data center, wiping swaths of the Internet’s cloud computing services with it, including Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest.

At this month’s SearchCIO360 dinner, we met Seth Kutty, director of IT at Tesla Motors, one of the ten companies that are changing the world. Don’t miss our upcoming dinners in Chicago and Boston!

And as we have been writing about here in the CIO/IT Strategy Media Group for some time now, the “new” CIO is many things to many different companies. But our SearchCIO.com news director did a little digging into just exactly what kinds of skills companies are asking for in their top IT executives, and the answers are very interesting.

Here’s a sampling:

• The vertical virtuoso
• The enforcer
• The protector
• The translator
• The negotiator

Not only do they sound like some real or potential Hollywood action flicks, these job skills show how intertwined the CIO and senior IT have become in the inner workings of the business as a whole. Non-IT executives should remember that when they are looking for ways to transform their businesses for today’s uncertain markets.

That is, it has never been more important for CIOs to think about competitive advantage as a business philosophy.

Today, every bit of technology usage amounts to some sort of competitive advantage. It’s a factor in big data and business intelligence, outsourcing, and cloud.

Now technology for competitive advantage is starting to count as a benchmark for CIO success, writes SearchCIO.com Senior News Writer Linda Tucci. Gathering competitive intelligence has become a daily task for George L. Reed II, CIO at Seven Corners Inc., a privately held global travel insurance provider in Carmel, Ind. “You learn who’s taking risks,” he said.

Fortunately, this is the right time for CIOs to come to their CEOs bearing competitive intelligence, which would lead to new ideas — or as Michael Porter might say, what not to do.

Last November we asked IT professionals some very personal questions about their job satisfaction, salary and compensation, and overall IT zeitgeist. From the compensation survey data, we’ve learned that overall, 2011 IT salaries remained flat or were slightly depressed compared to 2010, but that salary was only a small part of overall job satisfaction. Our courageous respondents were extremely honest about the state of their careers, including revealing what they received for their 2011 annual pay increase.

The majority (59%) of CIOs and senior IT executives in midmarket companies received an annual performance increase of 2.0% to 4.9%. Another 8% received an annual salary increase of less than 2%. When we looked at the compensation survey data from last year — specifically, the average salary for senior IT executives in the midmarket — there was a 2.9% overall increase compared to the average salary for senior IT executives who took the same survey in 2010. And this average salary increase is not solely a trend in midmarket companies: We looked at the raises reported by all respondents in every size of organization, and found that 63% of consultants, IT managers and CIOs alike received an annual salary increase of 2.0% to 4.9%. In fact, midmarket companies were slightly more generous —  14% of senior IT executives at midmarket companies received an annual salary increase of 10% or higher, compared to just 10% of all survey respondents.

According to many CIOs we spoke with, salary doesn’t matter as much as their feeling of accomplishment and the chance they have to play with shiny, new technologies. Hopefully the cold hard truth will help decrease the mental tickle when your friend over at Hot Tech Company X mentions his 33% annual salary increase.

The 2011 compensation survey data seems to suggest that it’s not what you do that’s important but how you do it. High earners in midmarket companies were less likely to spend their time managing IT projects and more likely to work building IT relationships with other parts of the business. It might be something to consider when formulating your 2012 salary goals.

I came across a blog post recently by Scott Adams, describing a fantasy world where countries weren’t so paralyzed by legacy systems that they couldn’t move forward. Older systems have too many vested interests, making it difficult to change because “anything that has been around for a while is a complicated and inconvenient mess compared to what its ideal form could be,” Adams wrote.

This got me thinking about the real legacy systems holding back IT: The projects that never go anywhere, not because the project itself is bad, but because the change would overwhelm the systems, strategies, processes and workflows that may not integrate with the change. How, too often, the need for agility is acknowledged, but never addressed. And, more importantly here, how the bigger you are, the more difficult it is to change.

So here’s to all the small IT shops out there, where each member of the staff wears multiple hats and puts in the extra hours because, let’s face it, who else will? Being smaller means you’re closer to the top, closer to making a difference. Yes, your budget is probably smaller and you can’t get to all the things you know you need to tackle, but there are also far fewer hoops to jump through and approval signatures to get.

If you take all of that into consideration, maybe the grass is greener on this side: You can quickly adopt new technologies and there is less red tape. And you probably aren’t so buried in legacy systems that every infrastructure change requires duct tape and a sprinkle of IT magic to get it working.

But Rackspace and NASA hope to change all of that with OpenStack, an open source cloud computing platform that should bring more standardization to the cloud.

The project could improve portability and reduce costs, with more standard features, meaning users will be able to move among vendors and even move the cloud in-house down the road. While OpenStack provides more power, storage and processing power on demand, serving the needs of larger companies looking to build complex cloud environments, the standards it is setting could also make this an attractive option for SMBs.

Other open source offerings are available from Eucalyptus (providing infrastructure software to support the creation of cloud computing environments) and Cloud.com, with packages available in its free community edition, and also from its open source and proprietary editions.

While the OpenStack project itself was designed to serve scientific computing needs, it also aims to fill another gap in the cloud computing marketplace: As a cloud platform that doesn’t have a single commercial owner, it puts the business back in charge of its own data.

Could the standards and portability these open source cloud projects aim for open the door for widespread midmarket adoption?

However, a rise in mobile video devices, such as the iPhone4′s FaceTime and the Cisco Cius, could bring video anytime, anywhere. So how important will mobile video conferencing be to the enterprise?

On the one hand, mobile video conferencing will be a way to include traveling executives or remote workers in important meetings. On the other hand, these outward-bound employees may not always be in a private, quiet space that will allow them to fully participate.

The results of a 2009 CIMI Corp. survey of collaborative behavior showed that the number of mobile workers who believed that mobile video conferencing was helpful was less than 10%. The off-site workers did not feel they could actively participate in mobile video conferencing because of a lack of facilities, lack of network capacity to support connection and lack of privacy.

Another consideration is the potential for impromptu video conferences. Organizations with traditional conference rooms may have to plan their conferences weeks in advance. Conferences rooms with dedicated telepresence technology could book up quickly, but utilizing mobile technology on a tablet or similar device would allow users to pop into any room for a similar experience.

Plus, there is real value in being able to show someone explicitly how to do something and being able to read visual cues that could encourage communication and collaboration. Without these cues, it’s difficult to know when it’s appropriate to “jump in” on a voice conference.

The costs and benefits have to be weighed (and one may tip the scale in your organization), but remember: It’s not just about buying these devices — you have to consider changing work patterns and other business impacts.

According to George Spalding, an executive vice president at IT management consulting firm Pink Elephant in Rolling Meadows, Ill., more than 300,000 individuals worldwide have taken IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) exams since January 2009. While both V2 and V3 have been offered as of late, there were more people seeking V3 certification than V2. “It was time to get everyone up to speed on the same version, speaking the same language,” he said.

ITIL V3, introduced in 2007, emphasizes a more business-driven, top-down approach to IT management, an approach that was expected to gain more executive support. However, ITIL V3 gained momentum slowly. In an online ITIL adoption survey from Q3 2009 of organizations (mostly from North America) with 500 employees or more, the results showed that while ITIL V3 adoption was occurring, it was happening slowly and in pieces. At the time of the survey, only 4% of respondents indicated that they were implementing V3 from scratch.

Many organizations stuck with ITIL V2 Foundation for so long because they were comfortable with it. Plus, the timing was all off: Shortly after V3 was announced in 2007, we spiraled into a recession, so new initiatives were shelved. And before that, “many organizations were still maturing their ITIL V2 strategy,” Spalding said, “It can be hard to switch gears midproject and onto a new version.”

What does this really mean for users, that there won’t be another alternative for ITIL V2 Foundation certification? Will this affect your IT shop?