• Apparently, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer‘s desire to out-innovate Apple really bubbled to the, um, Surface, this week in the form of his trademark Howard Dean-esque shoutiness.
• And while we’re sure the tech innovation under the Surface is swell, pardon us if we are a little more wowed at present by the kids who made these gloves that translate sign language into speech.
• The first photo uploaded on the Web (not to be confused with the Internet) will have its 20th anniversary this coming week. Believe it or not, it was totally ”safe for work” – albeit not so much for fans of halfway decent Photoshop skills.
• Hey, Google and Apple — can your maps do this? Recce is an interactive map, a real-time information provider (think train schedules and bite-by-bite restaurant reviews) and, oh yeah, a gaming platform. Rumors that it’s also a floor cleaner and a dessert topping have not been verified.
• The list you’ve compiled while sitting alone in the far corner of your office may be longer, but here are four reasons your company needs a collaboration upgrade.
• Finally, in case you missed it, check out this week’s CIO Matters column on the agony and (potential) ecstasy of mobile device virtualization.

As you reflect and relax with family and friends this weekend, we hope you’ll spend a little time with this week’s roundup. We kick it off with bits from the social media realm, including why your CEO is hurting the company if he/she isn’t living a rich social media life; a few reasons why Facebook had a thumbs-down kind of week; and why social media and silos don’t mix. Finally, we hope you’ll take a few moments to help out with important research at The CIO Leadership Institute by taking their survey on social media.

• Funny, he seems so bubbly at the company meeting. Forbes looks into a recent IBM study that claims a CEO’s lack of a social media life may be to the detriment of the company.
• Unless you count the release of its rather Instagram-y camera app, Facebook had a pretty crummy week. Blogger Nigel Cameron offers up three simple reasons no one seems to want to be in a relationship with FB since its IPO.
• It’s called social media for a reason – keeping it siloed is against its nature (oh, and a waste of money).
• What happened in Utah could happen anywhere, a simple little mistake cost millions of dollars, scores of data and a CIO’s job — so what can we learn from the little big breach?
• Still on the fence about bring-your-own-device, or BYOD? Ugh, just do it all ready, says Mashable, rolling its eyes and handing you these five easy steps to BYOD transformation.
• It’s a long weekend, so we know you have the time to take this survey from The CIO Leadership Institute — you can use the hand not holding the hot dog to tap the screen or click the mouse. Thank you!

Mobile may be on your mind. Perhaps you have your head in the cloud. That’s all well, good and important to the CEO, as long as you can show you’re adding value to the business and creating competitive advantage.

The theme of MIT Sloan’s 9th Annual CIO Symposium, held Tuesday in Cambridge, Mass., was “Piloting the Untethered Enterprise.” But the strong message coming from a panel of CEOs to CIOs was to make sure you’re firmly entrenched in the business — and all the better if that spot is between the business and the consumer. And, oh yes, that magical word everyone likes to invoke – innovation – came up a lot in association with the CEO’s preferred CIO.

It’s crucial that CIOs have a firm handle on new technologies and delivery systems. Object Management Group Inc. chairman and CEO Richard Soley pointed out that, as enterprises transition into this untethered age, the CIO has to be there to solve all the standard problems — security, for example — for the new wave. But if IT leaders stop there, so might their careers.

“What’s important is, are they involved in the CXO suite’s informal discussions and where the company is going strategically? And are they part of the decision of where the company is going strategically?” Soley said, adding that he likes the idea of CIO standing for chief innovation officer. “Standards are the basis for innovation, and that’s the opportunity for the CIO: to bring in standards both global and local and make changes to the organization.”

Jeffrey Markley, CEO at Boston-based Markley Group Inc., drew a comparison between the CIO and another C-suite member: the CFO. If a CFO functions as “just an accountant,” what does that do for the business? He’s doing his job, a job that needs to be done, but adds no unique value. What CIOs do is critical, but if they stick to the strict definition of the role, they’re going nowhere.

“It’s really up to the individual. We know people in this room who’ve gone from CIOs to chief innovation officers, people who are making changes in the organization,” Markley said. “I want to surround myself with brilliant people who are going to make our company stronger, better and get us into new opportunities and make our customers grow and be happy and want to do business with us.”

Scott Griffith, chairman and CEO at Zipcar Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass., got specific with his expectations. He used his own company as an example of why it’s imperative for the CIO or IT leader to have a seat at the C-suite table. With big-name rental companies Hertz and Avis poised to assert themselves in Zipcar’s business space, information is Zipcar’s biggest weapon in keeping its competitive advantage.

“We know more about our customer than anybody that’s going to enter this business. We did 4 million reservations last year, and shame on us if we didn’t mine all of the information out of those reservations and figure out how to become a better company and drive a better experience and be more profitable,” Griffith said. “Information is integral to all that. [The CIO role is] a seat-at-the-table job, and every company should be picking that up. The top information job is going to be more strategic.”

Well, guess what? That table is turning. Or at least, it was my fleeting impression yesterday at the annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium that the language of business seems to be morphing into the language of technology.

The theme of this year’s conference was how the role of the CIO will evolve in the digital business world. Now, as some readers of this blog might remember — and as repeat attendees of the MIT Sloan Symposium certainly know, the evolving CIO role was a major theme at last year’s symposium. The tagline, however, of this year’s event — Beyond the Crossroads — signaled that something was different. And something was, never more so than in the CEO panel that kicked off the day. The most striking aspect of the speakers was their tech savvy: Tech talk practically rolled off their tongues — and I’m not referring just to the word cloud, which came up often enough.

Take David Castellani, senior managing director and CEO at New York Life Retirement Plan Services. He wants to “destroy the desktop” and move “to dumb terminals, iPads and small phones.” For Eric Openshaw, vice chairman and U.S. technology, media and telecommunications leader at Deloitte LLP, social media is top of mind (nothing too surprising there); but Deloitte, he went on to explain, is struggling to get “the right platforms” for both internal use and for engaging with the external world. Data analytics also is critical for Deloitte; indeed, the firm’s $1.2 billion investment in that analytics now allows it to do things like predict a bank failure within 60 days of it happening. But the “great opportunity” for his and every other company, according to Openshaw? That lies in “mining unstructured data,” he said. I could give other examples.

Now, the organizers of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium might have gone out of their way to find tech-savvy CEOs and business people for their panels, but that would distinguish this symposium from last year’s. There, CEOs and CIOs alike voiced the same old CIO leadership issues in the same old words, such as speaking in the language of business, or the need for CIOs to align IT with business goals. Yesterday, CEOs at least sounded like they are indeed operating in a digital business world and have moved beyond the crossroads.

Email Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer.