This week the release of Google’s Chrome OS, Chatter from Salesforce.com, Mozilla about speeding up the web and contact lenses with built-in virtual graphics.

• Social Media ROI Examples & Video
  A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social
  Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media?
  Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort:
  “What’s the ROI of your phone?” Other times it’s not appropriate to
  respond with this answer, which, if done in the wrong tone, or place,
  can win you a free punch in the face. Then there are the naysayers that
  adamantly proclaim, “We aren’t doing social media because there isn’t
  any ROI.”
• Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale
  Small and medium business needs are typically very different to
  ‘enterprise’, which in general business usage tends to refer to
  companies with over one hundred million in revenue. This can also be
  misleading however since many ‘enterprises’ are in fact federations of
  autonomous smaller business units.
• The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process
  The industrial influence in business management and theory is profound.
  In essence, for the past hundred years business has been objectified as
  a machine, divided into various components, like a clock or an electric
  generator. Components are composed of subcomponents, and so on, until
  you get down to nuts, bolts, and flywheels. People are — in the
  industrial scheme of things — gears in the machine, and their purpose
  is to perform a defined role in the assemblage.
• Salesforce.com Unveils Salesforce Chatter – Enterprise Collaboration
  Salesforce Chatter application allows any company to collaborate in
  real time with a secure, private social network for their enterprise
• Twitter Doesn’t Create Influence, it Reveals it
  You can’t read more than a handful of tweets before someone mentions
  influence. You also won’t find a Twitter measurement tool out there
  that doesn’t mention influence. Some may ask how Twitter made so many
  people influential. It didn’t. I’d agree that it has made some people
  *more* influential if only because it gave people greater reach, but
  they had to posses some level of influence potential. (hmm, Influence
  Potential, a new buzz phrase?)
• Is Facebook Getting Uncool for 18-24s?
  Others aren’t so sure. “That [usage decline] could be for a small
  percentage of the age group, but I would want to see more evidence to
  show that that audience is running away from Facebook,” said James
  Kiernan, svp and group client director at MediaVest USA.  Kiernan
  believes much of the decline in the comScore numbers is due to younger
  people accessing the site via iPhones, BlackBerrys and other portable
  devices and applications. That skews the numbers, as there isn’t a
  single source that tabulates usage from all available platforms.
• Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics
  A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the
  way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that
  could display information beamed from a mobile device.  Realising that
  display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak
  Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of
  projecting images into the eye from a contact lens. One of the
  limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view.
  A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. “Our hope
  is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps
  50 cm to 1 m away,” says Parviz.
• A faster web with Resource Packages – Mozilla suggestion to have just one HTTP request
  One of the most common problem on the web is slow web sites, wasting
  the time of end users. Now, perhaps, Mozilla has come up with a
  solution for this, which will be applicable for all web browser vendors.
• Google Wave for Project Management
  If you are wondering what Google Wave brings to the Project Management
  world you may want to first start by reading a Wave that has been
  ongoing now for quite a while (I have been following & contributing
  to it for at least the last 6 weeks) titled Google Wave for Project
  Management.
• About Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News, Study Finds
  Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other
  Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new
  study by the Boston Consulting Group. Among regular Internet users in
  the United States, 48 percent said in the survey, conducted in October,
  that they would pay to read news online, including on mobile devices.
  That result tied with Britain for the lowest figure among nine
  countries where Boston Consulting commissioned surveys. In several
  Western European countries, more than 60 percent said they would pay.

Light reading:

• Chrome OS Virtual Machine Build Ready for Your Testing [Downloads]
• Google’s Chrome OS revealed — with video!
• Google Is Keeping Chrome OS Simple. Maybe Too Simple.
• Chrome OS Still A Year Away – Screenshots and First Overview
• What ChromeOS Means For Netbooks And Why Microsoft Needs To Be Scared

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Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious