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Near-Time is making collaboration easier, one wiki and widget at a time. The company recently teamed up with the Institute for Open Economic Networks to develop workforce partnerships through the creation of the Open Source Workforce Development initiative. The new initiative is paving the way for regional business leaders to collaborate on building a workforce with 21st century skills. "Open source workforce development promises to accelerate job training and economic development through grassroots collaboration," according to Reid Conrad, CEO of Near-Time.

Wiki and social software firm Socialtext has put its own spin on the spreadsheet. The new offering, SocialCalc, is a multi-user, wiki-based spreadsheet program intended to simplfy version control, reduce errors and increase productivity, Socialtext said. SocialCalc joins offerings from Google and others as an alternative to Microsoft's Excel, aimed at users for whom collaboration is a priority. It combines the functionality of a spreadsheet with a wiki and provides linking between sheets.

The daily need to tap into knowledge relevant to their field is driving tech workers in all types of organizations to scour the Web for timely, up-to-date information, but making sure it's accurate can prove a challenge. A recent survey asked tech workers how they search for information, to what degree they use and share it with others, how it affects their performance and how much they would benefit from subscribing to professional information services that vet information and sources.

HP has unveiled an initiative allowing academic institutions to collaborate with HP Labs in joint research through an open and competitive process. The HP Labs Innovation Research Program invites colleges, universities and research institutions around the world to submit proposals related to current research. Areas include "information explosion," "dynamic cloud services," "content transformation," "intelligent infrastructure" and "sustainability."

The enterprise Web 2.0 market will continue to gain importance in 2008 as an increasing number of firms look to Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking to solve long-standing information worker problems, according to a recent report from Forrester Research. As a result, Forrester expects to see strong demand for tools like enterprise RSS and social networking, along with an increased role for IT departments in technology acquisition. "Web 2.0 stepped into the collaboration and productivity market with a bang in 2007," says Forrester researcher G. Oliver Young.

Open innovation has been a hot management phrase for the past five years. So far, though, these collaborations have generally been focused on small-scale research and development, or technology ventures between giant global brands and smaller partners. Think Proctor & Gamble's collaborations with universities and suppliers or IBM's embrace of an open source software language which both saves the company money and provides it with a new revenue stream. What if you brought together design heads from some of the world's biggest global brands with the aim of stimulating innovation?

You can now help decide what Web sites your boss should block. A new service from OpenDNS lets users tag sites under categories such as "gambling," "hate" and "social networking." Others can weigh in on whether they agree with those classifications. If there are enough votes, the site gets added to a system used by companies, schools and other organizations to block access. OpenDNS says its approach is better than commercial software because more people are reviewing sites and can do so quickly as new ones pop up.

It's the bane of anyone who uses the Internet: remembering different user IDs, passwords and registration information for sites you use regularly. Soon, you may not have to. Some of the Internet's biggest players -- Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign -- are working on a new single sign-on that would take some of the hassle out of surfing the Web. The five companies on Thursday became the first corporate board members of the OpenID Foundation, which is behind an industry-wide initiative aimed at creating the system.

The commercial environment in which global businesses now operate has never been more complex or challenging. As a result, for organizations typically trading across multiple countries, time zones and cultures, effective communication methods have become critical as they seek new ways to gain a competitive advantage. For many years, audio conferencing has played an essential role in the pursuit of this goal, yet its ability to provide an effective alternative to physical communication has proved increasingly restrictive.