Fireman poles, slides, games rooms, aquariums and plenty of free food – all in a day’s work at Google apparently.

Have a look at this BBC clip to get a peek into Google’s wacky offices – certainly a far cry from the soul-sapping cubicle dreariness of most corporate offices.

Bronze medal social network (behind ever newsworthy Facebook, and MySpace) has announced that they have been taken over by AOL for a cash deal worth US$850 Million. The deal far surpasses the US$500 News Corp paid for MySpace in July 2005 – but the average price for each of their claimed 40 million users is slightly lower – US$21.25 vs. the US$25 Rupert Murdoch paid for each of MySpace’s 20 million users.

However it must be noted that their figure of 40 Million users is slightly contentious with Wikipedia listing some 20.3 million, and some of Bebo’s other claims have been questioned.

According to Frank Gens – IDC’s VP of research – IT majors like IBM, Microsoft and HP are beginning to take Web 2.0 and on-demand technologies seriously. He expects these vendors to aggressively target the collaboration and business-oreitnted social networking space this year. Not surprising, given that more than 40% of enterprises are expected to have a social network deployed internally by year end.

IBM in January unveiled its revamped Lotus Web 2.0 platform – a suit of collaborative services that tap into the online content & social networking trend. Gens predicts that the company will soon crash the Software-as-a-Service party with Salesforce.com-style “cloud-based” solutions.

Microsoft has been aggressively promoting on-demand versions of its key enterprise solutions. Keen to have its cake and eat it too, Microsoft is adopting a “software-plus-service” strategy which adds collaborative online functionality to its traditional software products so as not to cannibalize its cash cow.

Of course, the Web 2.0 incumbents will not take this challenge lying down. Google and its ilk have been busy “corporatizing” their services and solutions.

Let the competition begin!

Microsoft has formally jumped on the hosted services bandwagon – it recently announced plans to provide online versions of its corporate email and collaboration solutions.

Microsoft has been offering subscription-based versions of its Exchange email and Sharepoint collaboration solutions running on remote hardware for some time now, but this was limited to companies with more than 5000 employees. It is now ready to offer this service to businesses of any size.

This is certainly good news for small businesses. The trend toward hosted services makes it feasible for small companies to affordably deploy powerful tools and applications previously limited to larger enterprises with deeper pockets.

Microsoft has clearly been feeling the heat from the rapid growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. It is now responding with a hybrid “Software Plus Service” strategy. It remains to be seen if this is enough to head off the inroads that the likes of Google and Salesforce.com have been making into Microsoft’s corporate hinterland.

Yesterday, Apple head-honcho Steve Jobs finally unveiled the long awaited iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit – a collection of software tools and documentation designed to help programmer write new software for the platform). Until now the software on the iPhone was closed to developers, and programmers who wanted to create software for the device had to resort fairly complex ‘hacks’ to get their software working on the device.

A US workplace survey commissioned by LexisNexis revealed the extent to which information overload is affecting white-collar knowledge workers in today’s work environments.

Some interesting findings from the survey:

• 89% of the average white-collar workday is spent conducting research, attending meetings, and searching for previously created documents;
• Knowledge workers spend an average of 2.3 hours daily conducting online research;
• 62% of professionals admit wasting a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need;
• 75% of the respondents felt they were heading for an “information breaking point”.

My personal experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that knowledge workers in Singapore fare no better in resisting this information paralysis. Smart businesses would do well to better manage the information generated within and flowing through their organizations.

A well designed knowledge management system can be invaluable in ensuring that the right information is available to the relevant people at the proper time. The IT tools and services available today mean that even small businesses can afford to deploy powerful knowledge and learning systems that can help them thrive in this information-rich era.