IBM says a study it did of some 1700 Chief Executive Officers worldwide found that many indeed - or should be - grasping social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation.

If you're looking for a last-minute gift for Mother's Day, don't bother sending her a Facebook invite - chances are, she's probably already on it.

Microsoft is introducing a phone-a-friend feature into its Bing search engine, allowing searchers to ask their Facebook and Twitter contacts to supplement information gathered by the search engine itself.

If your employer or a potential employer asked you to hand over the keys to your house so they could search your possessions looking for something unspecified, I suspect you would be a little surprised and not a little outraged. Well, over the last few months there has been a significant number of reports of employers and colleges doing the digital equivalent of asking for your house keys by requesting Facebook passwords from employees, applicants and students.

Getting a positive return on investment from a social media campaign is about more than tracking the number of your Facebook fans and Twitter followers. It's about linking the social strategy to measurable business objectives, according to Gartner, which says most businesses aren't doing this.

Wikipedia and its users are planning more than 300 celebration events across six continents for the 10th anniversary of the free, online encyclopedia that has become an Internet juggernaut by spreading access to information with a model that lets anyone edit its articles.

Sure, companies have started using Web 2.0 tools, but one man says we've only seen a glimmer of the serious change that they're going to bring to the way we do business.

There's no doubt that 2009 was a rough year for startups and established businesses alike, but many are holding out hope that 2010 will be different, especially since venture capitalists seem to be loosening their purse strings. Keep an eye on these five businesses that offer fresh ideas to the Web 2.0 arena.

Last week I attended the GigaOM Structure 09 Conference, which is an innovation-oriented cloud computing conference. One of the interesting things about the Silicon Valley-based event: it brought together a mix of different types of companies, emerging technology products and services, and people with cloud challenges:

Back in 2004, Texas Instruments (TI) noticed a problem in its customer service department, one that's typical in companies serving technical customer bases. Some of TI's main customers (engineers) buy and use some of the company's most technical products, such as digital signal processors. TI needed a better way to quickly provide answers to customer questions, without the customer sitting on hold with a call center, waiting for a representative who might not even have the technical expertise to answer the inquiry.