According to Forrester research, spending on Web 2.0 applications is set to boom in North America and Europe. Releasing its survey findings at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Forrester believes that traditional enterprises are finally starting to embrace this “fundamental new way” of communicating with employees and customers.

Such traditional consumer giants as General Motors, McDonald’s and Bank of America have already embraced tools like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts and social networking. Analysts estimate that more than 60% of North American and European companies will make Web 2.0 a priority in 2008. It looks like the smart money in the Web 2.0 economy will be on the Enterprise side.

While the big investment focus in the Web 2.0 space remains in North America and Europe, the conditions are ripe for such applications to establish a foothold in Singapore. The promise of island-wide wireless broadband access is slowly becoming a reality, and a host of innovative mobile devices have begun to show up on our shores (although we are still awaiting, with drooling anticipation, the official appearance of the much-desired iPhone here).

The key Web 2.0 categories are: Blogs, Mashups, Podcasting, RSS feeds, social networking, widgets and wikis. Though much of the development in these technologies have been focused on engaging the youth / geek markets, the real winners will be those companies that can leverage these technologies to solve real business needs; thereby taking a bite out of the multi-million-dollar revenues that the traditional business-software industry commands.

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.

The writing is on the wall – the global economy seems destined for a rough ride ahead. The US appears to be caught in an economic rut and Asia may not be quite as immune from the woes of the US economy as many are hoping.On the home front, a recent HSBC survey revealed that small businesses in Singapore are far less optimistic about the growth outlook than they were six months ago.

Not all that surprising, really, considering a recent Business Times report that Singapore appears to be loosing its competitive edge – mainly due to sharp increases in wages and other operating costs.In fact, Singapore is now ranked # 7 globally in a table of most expensive office rents compiled by real estate consultants Cushman & Wakefield with an average rental rate of SGD 185 per sq ft. Meanwhile, Singapore’s GDP shrank by 4.8% in Q4 of last year.So, how should a small business weather this “perfect storm”?