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Could someone get him out of here? He’s very distracting.

• 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.

This week’s roundup of tidbits from around the Web touches on a few of those aforementioned changes: in what IT is investing in, in the data center development cycle and in mobile strategies.  Still, there are some things that it seems will never change: A floppy disk means “save,” kids. Why? Because we said so.

More proof that your mobile strategy touches pretty much everything you do, and underlining the importance of the CIO’s relationship with the chief marketing officer and the business: Thanks to social media and mobility demands, investment in CRM (customer relationship management) software has jumped from No. 18 to No. 8 in a Gartner Inc. survey of CIO and CEO priorities.

Still not convinced of the importance of a mobile strategy? Even within the slow-grinding gears of government, the call for “mobile first” is gaining traction.

Blogger Greg Ness opines on how the commoditization of network hardware could drive a new data center development cycle.

So, maybe she doesn’t always give you the best directions or particularly accurate weather forecasts. Did you ever think maybe Siri is just meant for a higher calling? Forget the neoprene case — get this lady a lab coat.

It hadn’t occurred to us until we saw this post that, for some computer users, the floppy-disk icon is not “the floppy-disk icon” — it’s “that thing you click on” to save stuff. It says something very interesting about the evolution of culture and language, yes, but mostly it just makes us feel old.

Just a few weeks ago, in this very spot, I was talking about the whole idea of a frictionless enterprise. Not my idea but that of many future-looking industry analysts, introduced to me by Forrester Research analyst Phil Murphy. He was talking about manufacturing, ERP and other business processes, but the general idea is the same: Where we’re headed is a world of hands-off, intuitive movement from one thing to the next.

The webinar focused on how personal cloud solutions are poised to be the next big disrupter in technology. How big? Analysts Carolina Milanesi and Michael Gartenberg predict that by 2015, consumers will spend upwards of $2 trillion annually on digital information, entertainment, products and services. Consumers no longer care so much about devices as about what those devices can do. At the core of the analysts’ thesis is that proposed personal cloud solutions will displace personal computers as the center of consumers’ digital lives. Their message seemed to be aimed at marketing, yes; but as we all know now, the CIO and chief marketing officer need to get cozy for businesses to succeed. From their millions of tablets to their billions of smartphones and laptops, consumers want a “frictionless” experience from one device to the next. You can’t save your best stuff for tablet users or laptop users, and expect smartphone users to be happy — mostly because they’re all the same customer.

Whether your company serves up games, insurance or personal banking, it doesn’t matter — customers expect you to meet them where they are in order to do business. And if meeting them means on their iPad or Android phone, the look and feel have to be the same every time, or they’ll get frustrated and start looking at other options — and there are plenty. The only way to really ensure they get your company’s message, the service they want and the most user-friendly experience possible is to have marketing and IT work together to make that happen.

In the Gartner webinar, Gartenberg offered a prediction that drives home the importance of being frictionless, of being with your consumer in the desired context:

“By 2015, context is going to be more influential to the mobile consumer services relationship than search engines are to the Web. The reason is very simple: In terms of context tied to these personal cloud services, I can not only deal with the consumer as a past thing in terms of history, [or] a present [thing] in terms of what they are doing. I can actually tap into things like intention, and influence their decisions going forward.”

At least that’s what mobile app expert Bill French believes, and he backs up his opinion with some solid examples.

The topic came up when I asked him about the better mobile app development approach: native app development, HTML5 for mobile or a hybrid approach using the PhoneGap platform.

“Why bother [developing your own mobile apps] when there are 74 options for a given business function?” asked French, founder of the iPad CTO news portal.

In the business intelligence (BI) space, for example, you don’t need a native application to display business data — and what enterprise isn’t trying to figure out how to deliver data to mobile devices?

“There are solutions like Geckoboard and the Klipfolio dashboard, in beta, that leverage open Web standards to deliver BI visualizations that are comparable to native apps. And if you absolutely must have the snappier performance or heightened security of a native app, RoamBI is an ideal solution that leverages integration services with many enterprise services and even Google Docs at very reasonable prices that small businesses can afford,” he said.

So, existing mobile business applications — or tools that allow a company to integrate the mobile form factor with off-the-shelf software — will cover many enterprise needs, but there will be just as many cases when they don’t.

Some industry needs are just too specific, and many off-the-shelf mobile apps are not developed with specific enterprise security, data privacy and compliance needs in mind.

Still, French makes a good argument for not breaking the bank on mobile app development, even in a complex area like BI.

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director.

Large-scale deployments of mobile business apps will move beyond the realm of marketing within the next few years, predicted Jim Worth, director of global services at pharmaceuticals manufacturer Merck & Co. Inc., during a panel discussion titled “Mobile: Delivering New Context and Capabilities to Applications and Collaboration” at the recent Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston.

Sure, Merck is building mobile applications to help educate doctors and patients about various health care issues — a huge marketing opportunity, Worth said — but an experimental budget is allowing his team to also investigate how data can be collected and pushed out to mobile devices. One mobile app is being considered that would collect vital signs and report them to a central location. Another potential app is one that would send an alert to patients’ mobile devices when it’s time to take their medication.

Yet another mobile application is one that would alert a specific member of a clinical trial team if something is holding up the trial process, Worth said

Other companies are in the development stage with mobile business apps. For example, a large airline has tapped IBM to build a native application for frequent flyers. That app would look for a frequent flyer’s mobile device to come online, and then send travel updates or even alert a customer service rep to call the customer.

Geolocation also presents business opportunities, not just in the context of sending coupons to mobile devices but, for example, to locate members of a project team and sync them up with each other or with business partners in the area.

Panel moderator and mobility expert Maribel Lopez, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. and founder of Lopez Research LLC, called this “connecting with context.” She described a scenario in which a mobile device could pinpoint her location, search her LinkedIn account to see whether any of her connections are in the vicinity, and based on her preferences, recommend a restaurant where they could meet.

“I’ve allowed all these services to dig into my information because I want the value [these services] create,” Lopez said.

Given the social nature of many workforces these days, it is possible that people could look at geolocation services as an advance, not an intrusion.

Still, geolocation creates privacy and security issues for both employees and corporations. As a result, enterprises are developing policies during the experimental stage for the use of mobile business apps.

“There’s a whole bunch of policy questions; and before you can write those policies, you need some experiences,” Worth said. “So, do some experimentation and quickly follow that up with a policy.”

Let us know what you think about this post; email Christina Torode, News Director.

According to its press release, Harvard’s mobile strategy is “a response to the rapid worldwide shift toward a ‘mobile-first’ culture of information consumption.” “Mobile technology represents a profound evolution in the way people connect to information, services, culture and community,” Harvard President Drew Faust is quoted as saying. “Increasingly, students, faculty and staff members carry the Internet in their pockets and purses. This unified Harvard mobile experience allows individuals within and beyond our community to access the information they need to know, anywhere, anytime.”

Harvard is not the first school to adapt to this profound evolution.

Indeed, the Harvard offerings are being developed as part of iMobileU, a collaborative framework based on the MIT Mobile Web Open Source Project, formed last year to allow universities to jointly develop mobile-friendly apps. In the commercial world, the term mobile strategy has become an agenda item. Even a conservative mutual fund company like Vanguard is determined to adapt to an information anytime, anywhere world.

So, does Harvard’s official endorsement of mobile computing mean the world has changed? As I was debating whether the university’s mobile strategy merited a blog mention, another pronouncement showed up in my inbox: “Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivers closing international keynote at the IFA 2010 conference: ‘The future is now,’ says Schmidt.”

According to the press release, Schmidt “took to the keynote stage” at the world’s largest consumer electronics and home appliances trade show to preview new technologies. The marvels included tools for Android-powered smartphones that translate conversations from one language to another as one speaks.

But it was not the preview that boggles the mind, so much as the here and now. More than 200,000 Android-powered smartphones are activated every day, and the Internet will soon deliver information to three or four billion people, “not just the elite,” via smartphones, Schmidt said. (His observation echoed a 1939 keynote at IFA [the German name translates into "International Fair of Broadcasting Services"] by Albert Einstein, said Jens Heithecker, IFA’s executive director: “Einstein was talking about radio, the new technology of the time. He said, ‘technology enables communication and communication connects people.’”)

Everything that rises must converge, is what I thought, and that naturally sent me scurrying to Google to check the reference. What I found was that the pronouncement was made first by religious philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Future of Man: “At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”

English majors and viewers of the “Lost” episode “Incident, Part 1″, will more readily identify the prophetic words as the title of a short story collection by Flannery O’Connor. (Jacob is reading it while sitting on a park bench at the moment John Locke plummets out of a window.) O’Connor’s harrowing stories mostly leave the salvation part of the quotation unsaid. They examine people who are forced to confront a dramatic shift in their world view — in the case of the title story, racial integration — and who sometimes do not survive as a result of that confrontation.

For those among us who can stand the ascent, however, mobility holds out the promise of making a multitude upwardly mobile, at least culturally: Harvard in the palms of our hands.