That was Then... This is Now

The 2011 "U2 360" stage is seven stories high and weighs 54 tons. It can cover most of a major league baseball field and keeps most of the electronics directly above the stage. To ensure that each show comes off without a hitch, show producer Live Nation Entertainment which used to build all its own custom IT, has deployed off-the-shelf Dell Precision R5400 rack-mounted workstations and UltraSharp U2711 monitors for concert video control and management. Recently eWEEK had the opportunity to check out the results of a U2 show first hand; the one in this slide show was staged June 17 at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif.

Starting May 27th, radio and television stations in France will no longer be allowed to use the names of the social networking sites in their broadcasts. The reason is a 1992 law that bans promotion of business enterprises on network television programs. Any mention of “follow us on Twitter” or “visit our Facebook page,” in the eyes of the French government, represents advertising and promotion of those sites. Reporters are still allowed to mention the sites by name if the news story itself concerns one of the businesses, but referring to Facebook or Twitter in a promotional capacity will not be allowed. There's still no word on how the law will be enforced or what the penalties will be. Follow me on f***b*** for more information… (Source: Time NewsFeed)

Businesses today know that information can be a genuine strategic advantage. The question then becomes how does one get information that has real value? Traditional methods, like those used in many IT departments are increasingly irrelevant in a fast paced, uncertain world. Many are “historically” based; others are often constructed around complex models that require careful and often lengthy interpretation. While you are still trying to “figure out” the data, your competition is moving ahead. In this article from Bottom Line, Samuel Greengaard makes a case for Social Networking as a form of Business Intelligence. Social networking as defined here extends beyond LinkedIn and Twitter. For example, conventional search engines, such as Google, are remarkably good at gathering information from an existing data pool. But there's another data pool that's essentially untouched: the collective knowledge and problem solving skills of a group. Many younger workers naturally gravitate to