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.

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.

Apparently half a billion people across the world log on to the internet from a cybercafe everyday. Jooce – a Luxembourgh-based start up – aims to tap into this huge reservoir of “cybernomads” with its new virtual desktop.

This free, web-based desktop aims to give users all the functions of their very own PCs from any computer with an internet connection – “their very own private space online,” according to Jooce founder Stefan Surzyck. Jooce gives users easy access to emails, online storage, instant messaging and such.

However, much of the core functionalities that it currently aggregates appears quite old-hat – you can pretty much do the same thing with free services from Google, Yahoo! and the like. Jooce does stand out with a slick and quite intuitive user interface, though, and it is being aimed squarely at the developing digital world – Jooce is involved with a number of digital-divide bridging projects in places like the Philippines, India & China.

Jooce is just one among many companies pursuing the holy-grail of a web-based operating system. Its long-term business model seems a little hazy at the moment, but Jooce does have the backing of Mangrove – the VC firm that initially funded Skype.

Nicholas Carr first gained notoriety within the corporate IT world in 2003 with his provocative Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. In the article, Carr argued that companies could no longer gain any strategic advantage from IT investments as its ubiquity had made IT simply another cost of doing business.Carr is now back with another book that is sure to raise the hackles of corporate IT types yet again.

In “The Big Switch“, Carr compares the trend toward grid or cloud computing with the development of the electric grid more than a century ago.Carr agues that much in the same way that stand-alone electric dynamos disappeared with the rise of national power grids, today’s islands of corporate IT resources will be made irrelevant with the shift to utility computing. And as the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centres into the cloud, the traditional IT department is set to go the way of the Dodo.

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”?

Google has announced the release of Google Apps – Team Edition, designed as a simple, accessible way for small teams within an organization to collaborate on documents and calendars, without the intervention of IT support personnel.As online threats like spyware, viruses and rootkits multiply, IT departments are typically overworked, and understaffed.

To keep their networks secure IT departments are notoriously cautious about what applications they allow on their networks. This can be very frustrating for the growing percentage of savvy users, who use increasingly sophisticated tools at home, and feel artificially limited when at their office computer. The new version of Google’s App Suite is targeted squarely at them.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company Salesforce.com’s latest release (Spring ‘08) will add Content Management and Collaboration features to its bag of tools. Salesforce.com also list 50 new features in its core CRM solution.

Many of these new features apparently started as ideas on the company’s own IdeaExchange forum.Salesforce Content is an interesting addition to the suite that uses social media concepts such as tagging, subscriptions and recommendations to allow users to manage unstructured content within the Salesforce environment.

Other recent networking concepts have been deployed within the Salesforce Ideas module to facilitate the management of communications and user feedback.It certainly is encouraging to see Salesforce.com taking the lead in turning popular innovations from the social networking sphere into tangible business oriented solutions.

InfoWorld has announced its 2008 Technology of the Year Award winners and one Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application to earn kudos is eXpresso. Named as the Best Spreadsheet Collaboration application, eXpresso enables the easy creation of communities for sharing Microsoft Excel files.

Powered by an Oracle database, eXpresso provides more extensive content auditing & management control than services such as Google Spreadsheets. Going beyond basic file versioning capabilities, eXpresso ups the ante by incorporating interactive community features like chat, social tagging and simultaneous editing. The well thought-out interface also adds to a very satisfying user experience.

Priced at US$15 monthly per user, eXpresso certainly warrants a close look for SMBs that rely on Excel as their primary planning and tracking tool.

Google has recently added some new features to Google Presentations, which is a component of the free Google Docs office suite. Google Presentations has the same basic features as Microsoft’s Powerpoint application, but lacks much of the professional polish and wow-factor of the latter.

Where the Google applications shine, though, is in their collaboration features. Multiple people can collaborate on creating a presentation and the finished product can easily be shared publicly or with an invited group. Major new feature include the ability to easily embed slide shows into web sites as well as drag-and-drop image insertion and slide importing.