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Remember this? Still unimpressed by the iPhone 5?

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Gentlemen, please lay out your economic recovery plans in 140 characters or less.

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Leading off this week’s roundup, from our sister site SearchCIO-Midmarket.com, we have a CIO whose gold medal-worthy green tech innovation is truly energizing London’s Olympic Park. Also, read about how speeding to market with software could kill a trading firm, and read about the CIO’s role in IT transformation.

As chronicled on the SearchCIO-Midmarket.com blog, CIO Symmetry, the CIO of the London summer games scored big, lighting up Olympic Park with green tech innovation. And he didn’t even have to put on a Speedo.

Speed is great for sprinters and the like but can be downright dangerous for makers of stock-trading software. Perhaps Wall Street’s third stock-trading fiasco in five months will drive home this point.

Winning by changing the rules doesn’t sound very sportsmanlike. Unless we’re talking victory over network hackers — then by all means we ought to hear out the argument for changing the rules of writing code.

Think social collaboration is a frivolous pursuit? Perhaps this bar graph can convince you otherwise.

Finally, be sure to check out this week’s CIO Matters column, in which SearchCIO.com’s Editorial Director Scot Petersen looks at the role of the CIO in the midst of IT transformation.

Zynga may want to have a word with friends. Opinion is rife that Facebook doesn’t have the company’s best interests at heart.

We now know one outlet where BlackBerry users won’t be reading more bad news for RIM.

Where there’s money, there are criminals. Hot on the heels of tech innovation that makes your smartphone a virtual wallet comes a tech innovation that virtually steals that wallet.

Who doesn’t like a good chart? We especially like this one which attempts to diagram the main routes to unified information access (UIA) across silos when dealing with big data.

Finally, be sure to check out this week’s CIO Matters, wherein our crusading columnist Wendy Schuchart saves the day with awesomely powerful leadership lessons CIOs can glean from superheroes. Kapow!

• 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.

• We seem to remember lugging a single CPU about this size into our college dorm room. Is AOL about to literally change the IT landscape with its micro data center?

• Just a couple of weeks after word of the Surface surfaced as Microsoft’s long-anticipated response to the iPad, a familiar foe may be emerging to challenge Apple’s smartphone supremacy.

• In case you run into him on the beach and need to make conversation, check out Bill Gates’ summer reading list. It could happen, and if it does, you’ll thank us.

• A summer rerun on a blog? Really? Actually, wait,  shhh,  this is a good one – it’s the one with the data center maintenance checklist!

• You know you’ve been pondering BPM applications far too much if you can answer this question as readily as these folks.

• Finally, innovation takes many, many forms – even this one.

• If, upon seeing Google’s new Nexus Q streaming media device, your first reaction was “I wanna crack it open and see what’s inside!” this is the story for you. Geek.
• Problematic moniker aside, we love the idea of Girls Who Code, a collaborative effort among tech companies including IBM, GE and Twitter aimed at opening opportunities for young women in computer science.
• IBM engineers analyze data related to Boston traffic and come up with software solution. Oh please, in the name of all the dashboard saints, get the app for that, Beantown.
• Did everyone change their darn LinkedIn passwords? Good. Now read these pro tips on protecting data .
• Nothing lasts forever – except everything you do online. Here’s the bazillionth “shining” example, courtesy of Forbes contributor Deanna Zandt.
• Did we say nothing lasts forever? We hope this nerd love does.  At  least we know the site will go on, even if their hearts don’t.

 This company turned heads this week by making some of its own e-books available to other retailers. 

 Give employees a little of this — à la Aretha Franklin — if you you want them to excel at social CRM.

 Read on for the correct questions to these answers and more. Enjoy!

• It’s no big management secret that employees do better when they feel respected, but what you may not have considered how important this is to social CRM.
• The e-book you want you might not be able to get, depending on your e-reader. Or maybe you can get it, but you can’t get the print version if you go to certain stores. Advantage: library.
• Kids these days! A dad who is also a storage pro talks about why he wants big data and cloud to get off his lawn. You’ll read this if you know what’s good for you.
• It may be a little more Maxwell Smart than James Bond cool, but kudos to the latest innovation in pen-related tech.
• And finally, love makes the world go round — so it makes sense that Google wants to control it. Oh Google, we kid because we love.

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about how IT leaders are looking to fill soft skills gaps. It was based on a combination of conversations with CIOs and other IT execs and a recent study issued by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). The soft skills in absentia included things like innovative thinking, analytical skills, teamwork and project management abilities.

The story generated more responses from readers than I anticipated, and interestingly they seemed to share a general theme: filling that soft skills gap shouldn’t be that difficult. As one reader, Tony S., colorfully put it, in response to Modell’s COO Dan Sheehan’s search for good project managers, “You make it sound like Dan Sheehan is looking for the mythical unicorn.” Tony S’s contention? These skill sets are out there, but those who possess them are being weeded out of hiring processes because they tend to be older workers. The wisdom of experience is being eschewed for next-gen talents.

An anonymous reader, who self-identified as a software engineer, made a similar argument. “What’s interesting to me, in my experience, is that it took many years AFTER being a SW engineer to develop the rest of the skills in the article. Now with all the rest of the skills well in hand, I’d be pretty stretch[ed] to write code.”

There was also Tony B., a program manager consultant with 20 years of experience, who suggested the unicorns may be hiding in plain sight. His point: the talent is often there in the IT organization but it’s rarely cultivated. He maintains that the majority of executives, despite their best intentions on filling soft skills gaps, give little more than lip service to such goals because of the corporate environment in which they work. “The constraints are that they are measured in a way — short term cost-saving delivery targets in economically constrained markets — which is in conflict with their positive intentions on soft skills.” IT executives have the ability to unlock potential but lack the support to do so. Just get it done trumps innovation, analytical skills, teamwork, etc. every time.

I’d like to know more about your experiences. Are you part of an IT organization in which you yearn to show off your soft skills, but no one’s asking? Are you an IT leader who wants to champion the potential of your team members but are shackled by short-term pressures?

Or maybe you’re like outsourcing casualty Tony G. (yes, another Tony and my most avid reader) — a 40-year IT vet with a CV full of project management success stories who feels like those four decades of experience may now be working against him. After he read the piece, he asked somewhat jokingly, but with a wisp of hope, “Do you think that Dan Sheehan guy is taking resumes?”