I don’t think anything could be further from the truth.  I think that if you’re truly impassioned about what you’re working on, you can’t help to enjoy what you’re doing.

To that end, there seems to be a nascent movement toward creating tools for business that are able to achieve real results while not being so buttoned-down that they drain the humanity from the room.

The first inkling that I had of this was back in March at SXSW, where I ran into Amy Jo Kim, CEO of ShuffleBrain, on the flight from the West Coast out to Austin.  AJ and her team are doing some groundbreaking work in figuring out how brain games and social networks intersect.

The very next day, while still in Austin, I had the chance to attend a session called Playing On! Interface Lessons from Games, a panel anchored by Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEODesign.  And summarily had my mind tweaked in ways that were highly unexpected.

The net-net: Many of the key concepts that have helped propel games to be a $21 billion industry in 2008 are applicable in business, too.  The concept of “collecting” things, like experience points (XP) in role-playing games?  We see that behavior in business apps, as well…what’s in the upper-right hand corner of your Twitter screen?  It’s the number of “friends” you have — a collecting behavior.  The idea of going on a “quest” in that same role-playing game (what Nicole calls “Hard Fun” in gaming-speak)?  You see that concept every time you log into LinkedIn, and are told that “Your profile is 85% complete.”

Not only are the patterns from game design starting to make their way into business, but “games” themselves are being turned into serious facilitation techniques as well.

Last week at the Innovation, Design and Serious Games Exchange, I had the chance to see first-hand how a thorny, serious product management question (“What features do our customers really want in the next generation of our product?”) could be deftly teased out of a diverse group by way of a game-based technique.  Check out these two videos with Luke Hohmann, CEO of Enthiosys, where he facilitates a session that turns the traditional “focus group” into a collaborative design session:

“Buy A Feature, Part 1″

“Buy A Feature, Part 2″

(More on “Buy A Feature” here.)

I’m convinced there’s something going on.  There’s a fundamental improvement in the way business people interact in this kind of scenario.  It’s not the rote, mind-numbing, death-by-Powerpoint.  Instead, it feels like a shift toward bringing the “whole person” into the workplace using much more engaging techniques than have traditionally been used in many industries and environments.

So, what do you think?  Is this just some wacky, West-coast frittering away of time?  Or are we seeing the early stages of a fundamental change in business?

The United States is now providing a dashboard of federal IT spending, via a new site just made available at http://www.usaspending.gov.  According to the site:

“The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Transparency Act) requires a single searchable website, accessible by the public for free that includes for each Federal award:

1. the name of the entity receiving the award;
2. the amount of the award;
3. information on the award including transaction type, funding agency, etc;
4. the location of the entity receiving the award;
5. a unique identifier of the entity receiving the award.

USAspending.gov, a re-launch of www.fedspending.org, provides this information to the public, as collected from federal agencies, in an easy to use website.”

Here are the basics:

What is USASpending.gov?: It is a website that makes government spending accessible and understandable to the public.  It features multiple graphs about federal IT investment.  The site also provides insight into top government contractors and top assitance recipients.

Who’s doing it?: Vivek Kundra, the nation’s CIO, is the public face behind the project.  The respective CIOs of myriad government agencies are required to submit the same information that they use in their Office of Management and Budget reports.

Why is it important?: According to Kundra in a piece reported by Good Morning Silicon Valley, “Everyone knows there have been spectacular failures when it comes to technology investments.” This tool is designed to spot such disasters earlier, with the intent of heading problems off as soon as possible.

When is it available?: The site is available now.

Here’s a great video overview, found via the Infosthetics site:

Links and additional resources:

• Good Morning Silicon Valley : “New Dashboard Lets Us See How Much Mileage We Get Out Of Federal IT Spending“
• Sunlight Foundation : “Watching Government Opacity Melt Away Right Before Our Eyes“
• Fierce Government IT : “A Dashboard Makes Everyone Accountable“
• TechCrunch : “Can Open Government Be Gamed?”
  

In this video interview, I ask Beth about these initiatives and about her vision for future “We.gov” initiatives.

We hope Beth will engage with the Supernova Hub audience, and that in turn our audience will join in her open process.

Chris is both an early and late stage investor, and has invested in Photobucket and Twitter among many others. He also headed special initiatives at Google and advised the Obama campaign. (There’s more of a profile about Chris at Crunchbase.)

In this discussion he talks about several of his investments, including Twitter, phone service company Twillio, stealth-mode company Small Batch and more. He notes that all of these are enabled by the ability to host the sites in the cloud, and scale without needing to own their own infrastructure.

We hope to hear more from Chris at the Supernova conference this winter.

I’ve had the good fortune to know Julius and Larry for nearly fifteen years, since my days at the FCC during the Clinton Administration.  I worked with both of them on the Obama campaign’s technology advisory group, and on the Transition Team prior to Inauguration. They are both extremely capable, dedicated, and thoughtful.  And they both have experience working in government, at startups, and in large companies, which will serve them well in their new jobs.  (Julius has actually spoken twice before at Supernova – once as an executive at Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive Corp., and once as a key advisor to the Obama campaign.)

The FCC and NTIA have critically important roles to play in the next few years. The reason is that networks are changing.

First, broadband connectivity and the applications it enables aren’t luxuries any more.  When every independent band has a MySpace page and the President makes electronic health records a centerpiece of his health care reform initiative, it means the line between “using the Internet” and “living life” has collapsed.  The FCC oversees the vast subsidy system for “universal service,” but those mechanisms were developed decades ago to fund telephone connections by shifting money between monopoly phone companies.  In the 1990s, NTIA under Larry Irving pioneered the notion of a “digital divide” in Internet access, by that initiative fell by the wayside under the Bush Administration.  And finally, as the Net becomes a critical resource for democratic discourse and economic activity, the potential for network operators to act as gatekeepers over content and applications becomes a serious concern.  It’s time to refocus on what all these concepts mean in an interconnected broadband world.

Second, today’s Net is not the dotcom Web of 1999. The real-time Internet is changing expectations and business models.  We’ve just scratched the surface of what Google, Twitter, the iPhone, and Facebook will enable, because all of them are ecosystems rather than merely endpoints.  And services like Microsoft’s TellMe, BT’s Ribbit and Google Voice only hint at how communications will soon be transformed. Wireless data and online video are exploding: The executive director of the Mozilla Foundation estimates 90% of Internet traffic will be video in 2013; AT&T Wireless estimates mobile data usage in 2018 will be up to 600 times greater than it is today; and YouTube says wireless video uploading is up 400% just in the week since the launch of the iPhone 3GS.  The list goes on.

In recent years, the FCC and NTIA haven’t adapted with the world around them.  The FCC still has a Wireline Bureau, a Wireless Bureau, and a Media Bureau… but no Internet Bureau.  So how will it evaluate concerns about AT&T barring tethering and media streaming on the iPhone?  The old categories no longer work.  Similarly, while the website I built at the FCC in 1996 was pretty innovative at the time, it’s grossly inadequate today, despite the best efforts of a hard-working staff. The Bush Administration largely ignored technology and telecommunications.  It just didn’t see them as important, and agencies like the FCC and NTIA suffered as a result.

With the arrival of the Obama Administration, there’s an opportunity for the FCC and NTIA to emerge from their slumber.  Most immediately, in the economic stimulus package earlier this year, Congress directed NTIA to oversee a multi-billion dollar broadband grant program, and the FCC to develop a National Broadband Plan.  (Disclosure: I’m doing work for NTIA as an expert advisor on the grant program.) Work on both fronts is well underway.  Finally, though, these efforts will have leaders empowered to make strategic decisions.

Entrepreneurs and technologists like to dismiss government as byzantine and irrelevant, but in this case, doing so would be a mistake.  Julius and Larry understand how revolutionary the Net can be.  Yet they will need a great deal of help from those outside government to succeed.

Given my experience straddling the worlds of technology and policy, Supernova has always been a translation point between Washington DC and the tech community.  We’ll have several key figures from the Obama Administration at the conference in December.  If you care about the future of the Internet, you need to pay attention to the tech policy initiatives coming out of the FCC, NTIA, and other agencies.  The US government finally appreciates the potential of networks for change.

Paul Greenberg writes:

“Enterprise 2.0 so far has been an eyeopener because its telling me and around 1200-1300 others that there is not only a lot of cool and collaborative things going on but E2.0 is moving into mainstream thinking and soon into mainstream operations, systems, and best of all strategy…if you are a business person and you want to understand what you have to do in the next year to 2 years — this is it.”

Oliver Marks chimes in as well:

“Enterprise 2.0 was not well understood as a concept this time last year in most circles; twelve months on and many enterprise vendors have absorbed the core concepts, if not always the actual experiential benefits, into their offerings…While it’s great that there is now widespread understanding of the concepts of Enterprise 2.0, I find it is still an uphill battle to get people to understand the experiential side. There are plenty of people and companies who talk around the concepts without actually using them.”

And Alexander Wolfe from InformationWeek brings it home:

“I’m encouraged that the dirty little secret of Web 2.0 and social media technologies is finally being openly addressed by early adopters and vendors alike. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, there’s been frank discussion this week of the question average users have been whispering (so that their bosses don’t hear them): Namely, what can this stuff do for me that’s actually useful?

In truth, though, the answers to that question are not yet completely apparent. Here’s the deal. At last year’s conference, most denizens of the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 community were consumed with evangelism issues. There was a need to raise the profile of wikis, collaborative tools, social-messaging platforms – all the stuff that early adopters were already down with, but average corporate users, not so much.

This year, we’ve passed through the familiarity hurdle. We’ve all been wiki’ed up and Twitterized. The problem is, those who don’t have an innate feel for the technology, or whose jobs don’t make amorphous, asynchronous communications networks useful, have been left out of the cold”

There’s a lot more coverage of the conference here.  But the question that I’d like to raise is — for your organization or agency, is this “2.0″ stuff evolving to be tools that are used in the “real” world?  Or is it still only the bailiwick of the early adopters?

More interviews are coming soon, so subscribe today.

At the 140 Characters Conference in New York last week, I spoke with JP about how Business and Strategy are changing due to ubiquitous networks and new ways to access data. He noted that “Things that were previously synchronous, like voice communications, can now be asynchronous, and things that were previously asynchronous [like knowing people status, location or current work] can be synchronous.” There’s much more in the video.

JP Rangaswami is one of the many voices participating in the conversation here at Supernova Hub and at Supernova2009.

“Google last month reserved 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, signaling that it may finally be ready to roll out its long-anticipated Google Voice service.

The free service, announced in March, lets users unify their phone numbers, allowing them to have a single number through Google Voice that rings a call through to all their phones.

Sources could not say when the 1 million numbers may be assigned. Level 3 has been supplying Google with phone numbers since the introduction of Google Voice, so the 1 million numbers are an indication Google is close to adding a significant amount of users.”

The question: How will a broader rollout of Google Voice affect/integrate/expand the Android mobile user base?

Although the iPhone seems to get a disproportionate share of the media attention, the market is definitely not a one-horse race.  Palm has sold over 100,000 of its new Palm Pre devices, which became available on June 6 of this year.  The Pre is a gorgeous, capable device that has the one thing the iPhone doesn’t — a slide-out, physical keyboard.  Engadget says “Yes, this is epic stuff. The Pre (and its accompanying operating system) could likely decide the fate of the company largely credited with ushering in the age of the do-everything phone. Since Palm’s announcement at CES this year, news surrounding the Pre has been a veritable whirlwind of activity: rumors, half-truths, hate, love, fear-mongering, fanboyism, rampant gadget-lust… and even a little late night celebrity for the pint-sized phone. Finally the time has come to put rubber to road and get into the guts of this thing once and for all. Can the Pre and webOS live up to the hype — the kind of hype we haven’t seen since the launch of the original iPhone — or do they snap under the pressure?”  Indeed, the Pre may be the make-or-break moment for Palm, which ruled the roost in the Personal Digital Assistant market for so long, but has seen its fortunes decline as the smartphone platform absorbed all the primary capabilities of what had previously been a standalone device.

Not to be outdone, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) announced earnings on Thursday, noting that it moved 7.8 million new BlackBerry devices, signed 3.8 million new subscriber accounts and raked in $3.42 billion in revenue for their first quarter.  (Note that this means RIM moved twice as many BlackBerries as Apple did iPhones during the quarter.)  Geek.com says: “[Research firm NPD] said that smartphone category grew its share of the overall mobile phone market six percent annually, having jumped from 17 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to nearly one quarter (23 percent) of the entire mobile phone market. According to Rubin, this serves as clear indication of the rising popularity of the smartphone category that, by many analysts’ estimates, is already reshuffling the entire market. ‘Even in the challenging economy, consumers are migrating toward web-capable handsets and their supporting data plans to access more information and entertainment on the go,’ Rubin noted.”

Handset giant Nokia is in the game as well, not surprisingly.  Their Nokia N97 entrant also shipped this month, and carries forward touches like a high-end camera that earlier models such as the N95 sported.  Gartner reports that Nokia shipped 60.9 million smartphones in 2008, and carried a global 43.7% market share…more than twice as much as nearest-competitor RIM.

So what does this mean?  It means that the network is changing, dramatically.  Nearly one quarter of the new mobile devices coming on line are smartphones, with a huge year-over-year jump in the rate of change.  Capabilities in the areas of performance and storage seem to be doubling yearly.  Integration with social networks, content sharing sites, chat and other social features are being built right into the platform.  And, perhaps most importantly, the explosion in application development for the devices (led by the 50,000+ apps in the Apple iTunes App Store) indicate both developer embrace and customer uptake of the mobile device as a powerful - and perhaps soon-to-be primary - means of connecting with the network.