Anyone who has been in the IT sector for a reasonable amount of time will have collected their fair share of business cards. As a freelancer on the look out for new IT work, they used to be invaluable. Handing them out at conferences, training events, and even at chance meetings in the bar used to increase your chance of getting work. But with smartphones and social networking, are they as important as they used to be?

How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive? Technology has revolutionised the way that we do business, but the public sector has traditionally moved more cautiously than the private one. Now, a report from the Centre for Technology Policy Research in the UK has made some recommendations for the use of technology as an enabling mechanism for government.

The document discusses the concept of open government, which it defines as a government subject to public scrutiny, in which employees work in "smarter, better informed ways". In order to achieve open government, an administration cannot simply tack technology onto existing processes, the report warns. Instead, it suggests changing key processes from the centre outwards.

What might this look like? The report cites Tim O'Reilly, founder of technology publisher O'Reilly, arguing for government to be recast as an "open platform" that encourages innovation and change. To encourage this, the Centre for Technology Policy Research makes several suggestions.

Cultural changes are necessary to create an Internet-aware government, the document says. A vision must be created by leadership, outlining guiding principles that must then be enforced.

Audits should focus on outcomes, while enabling departments to achieve those goals using their own means. Opening up access to social media tools may help them to meet their objectives, by helping governmental organisations to listen to feedback from traditionally under-represented groups, such as front line workers. Other tools that could help to achieve positive outcomes include real-time communication tools such as live chat.

Other technology policies include a board-level, CIO function, compulsory training in technology and related policy for senior civil servants, and the integration of technology planning into public policy documents, rather than addressing it individually in dedicated IT planning documents. Other high-level recommendations include the revolutionising of procurement practices via the use of free cloud-based services for commodity functions such as social networking, and the replacement of all-rights-reserved licencing with open licence agreements in public contracts.

Talking of openness, the use of open standards and open source in public systems is a strong recommendation in the report. Government systems should support interoperability wherever they can, it said, adding that open source, taxpayer-funded code should be shared across all areas of government.

We are already starting to see cloud computing providers targeting this sector. For example, Google has been heavily targeting government players. The City of Los Angeles replaced its Novell Groupwise system with Google Apps last October. At a federal level, the US Government has launched its own cloud computing initiative under the banner Apps.gov, which includes applications from a number of cloud players, including Google and Salesforce.

Significantly, the UK Government just announced this week that it would be cutting $95m from its own IT budget, and David Cameron has in the past questioned the wisdom of large, centralised projects such as the National Health Service's mammoth Connecting for Health project. Instead, he has posited the idea of working with specialist cloud players to achieve similar goals. Signs are already emerging that we can expect a significant policy change in such areas.

All of this will radically change the role of service providers and the process of procurement in public sector IT, and those working in the area would do well to take note. A recent qualitative study conducted by Microsoft in conjunction with the Institute of Directors, called the Hybrid Organisation, describes the need to slim down the size of the state to the point where it performs on a third of national income, rather than half (see video, below). Technology will be crucial to driving the necessary efficiencies into government practice - and those with the know-how to make that happen will be able to capitalise on the trend.

This week was an important one for the Google Wave team. The company finally removed the invitation-only beta status from the product, meaning that anyone can use it. It also made the feature usable from within Google Apps, whereas it was only previously usable in individual Google accounts. The problem is that it may be a bit too late for this innovative product to make a dent in the way that people communicate.

Google Wave was announced a year ago at the company's I/O developer conference. It promised to revolutionise the way that people talked to each other online. It could be seen as an evolved version of instant messaging, with dramatically improved functionality. People could talk to each other in synchronous real time conversations, but could also revisit these conversations, known as Waves, over time. They could include other people in conversations at any time, and allow those people to replay the conversations chronologically to see how they had developed. People could insert comments at any point in a conversation, and could see each other typing. Waves could be embedded as objects, and accessed in different places.



The problem is that Google didn't do the best job of explaining the service to people, admitted Lars Rasmussen, one of the people who developed Wave. The product was daunting to use in its raw form. Rasmussen said this week that the team had failed to explain in the hour-long demo of the product what people might actually want to do with it.

The other big problem for Wave is one of critical mass. The service is designed to replace email, and it's about time that someone did. The first email was sent 40 years ago, and while it might have worked well then, it hasn't worked very well lately. Spam, excessive CCing, formatting issues, the difficulty of bringing someone into an email conversation that's been going on for a while - all of these problems make it a hindrance rather than a help for many.

But everyone uses email. Unless you're very important to someone, sending them an invitation to a Google Wave that could possibly require them to set up an account before they can even use it is going to be time prohibitive, and will probably mean you don't get a response at all, other than, "just mail me, will you?"

Then there's the availability problem. Yes, Google opened up access to Waves in Google Apps this week, but only in the Premier edition, which means that if you're a small business wanting to get into Wave communications, you'll have to pay for it.

Isn't this a bit backwards? Surely, if you're trying to persuade people to use a product that you've already admitted has been badly marketed and which few of them understand, you're going to want to give them a free ride?

I have a free Google Apps account, and a personal Google account that I use only because there isn't a Google Apps version of Google's Reader RSS aggregator. All of my contacts are in my Google Apps address book, rather than my personal one, and while I live on the Google Apps version of Gmail, I never check my personal Gmail account. I've tried using Wave in the personal version, and it's such a pain to log in and log out again, or to access each account using separate browsers, that I rarely bother.

This leaves enterprise users to take the open source Wave service and run instances of it in their own organisations, but as we know, enteprises tend to be a little conservative, especially in areas such as communication, which are often beset by regulatory constraints.

In short, it's going to take Wave a little longer to get off the ground than Google may have hoped, if indeed it makes it into the mainstream at all. And that's a real shame, because the concept initially showed a lot of promise. 

How secure are your networks? Not very, if new data from Symantec is to be believed. The organisation released its April Internet Security Threats Report (ISTR) last week, and the news was not good.

One of the things that the report outlined was a high profile in the targeted attacks on enterprises. Operation Aurora, discovered in January, involved attacks on well over 30 organisations from servers located in China. The attacks were highly sophisticated, and appeared to target companies' intellectual property. Google, which has been most public about the attacks that it suffered, was attacked via a zero-day vulnerability in the Internet Explorer browser (now patched) that enabled attackers to compromise machines. Reports in the New York Times suggest that the attackers stole the source code for Gaia, the search engine giant's single sign-on password system.

This isn't the first targeted attack campaign that we've seen. Last year, researchers at the Information Warfare Monitor, a joint collaboration between security research group SecDev and the University of Toronto, found a targeted botnet called GhostNet, which had been silently stealing information from organisations of particular political interest to the Chinese. This botnet, which consisted of around 12,000 machines, targeted computers including those of the Dalai Llama. Again, the servers controlling the network were largely hosted in the PRC.

Just a couple of weeks ago, working in collaboration with research organisation the Shadowserver Foundation, the same researchers uncovered yet another network, called Shadownet. Again, it targeted enterprises, rather than taking a scattergun approach and targeting computers indiscriminately, as many botnets do.

Things appear to be getting worse for Adobe in terms of security. The organisation, which has had to issue several out of band patches for its products in the past year, is having to cope with an increasing number of attacks against its Portable Document Reader. Most recently, security researcher Didier Stevens found a fundamental design flaw in the Portable Document Format, which attackers could use to manipulate any file into opening another file when launched, and in which a warning dialogue box could be altered, socially engineering the victim into accepting the file.

Attacks targeting companies using flaws such as this show no sign of stopping. What does it mean for IT professionals? It means that a course in ethical hacking (often called penetration testing) or network security could set you on the path to a new career. One of the most acclaimed certifications for pen testers in the UK comes from the Council of Registered Ethical Security Hackers (CREST). The chances are that in an increasingly paranoid industry, professionals certified in something like this are rarely likely to be out of work. 

When an industry gets big enough to spawn other sectors that grow parasitically on top of it, then you can tell it has some decent critical mass. And in many cases, that's where to look for jobs, or even start your own small venture.

Take mobile applications, for example. We all know that the iPhone has done exceedingly well as an application platform. So well, in fact, that start-ups are now forming with the sole purpose of measuring just how well. One such startup, Distimo, focuses on analysing trends in the mobile application space. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it found that Apple leads the field by an order of magnitude. At the recent World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Distimo said that there are 150,000 applications in the iPhone app store, compared with just 20,000 in that of its nearest competitor, Android.

Let's face it, iPhone apps are so accessible that someone might download one for 99 cents sitting on the toilet, instead of leafing through a back copy of National Geographic. Their accessibility can convert into serious amounts of money for developers. Tapulous, a 20-strong development company that makes games and social software for Apple's Jesus-phone, is now making $1 million each month from them. Not everyone can be that successful, but most of us would take just a small slice of that particular pie.

What makes it so bizarre is that Apple is such a fascistic company. People can write any application they want for Android, and upload it to the app store without any third-party arbitration. Apple, on the other hand, has a notoriously draconian app approval policy. For example, it took an arbitrary decision to remove almost all sexual applications from the app store this month -- but chose to leave in apps from organisations such as Sports Illustrated and Playboy. This is unlikely to make developers happy -- but with such a lot of money at stake, who's going to complain very loudly?

The unknown quantity in mobile applications is Microsoft. It chose Barcelona as the venue to announce the mobile edition of Windows 7, which is a marked improvement on all previous versions of Windows Mobile. It's a beautiful looking system, with a sleek user interface, and promised links into services such as Xbox Live, which will be like flypaper for consumers. But not everyone is convinced that developers will support the platform. Beejive CEO Kai Yu is quoted here as saying that the company has simply ruined its reputation with mobile developers too much in the past. There's also the fact that we won't see the first of these phones until the fourth quarter, which puts Microsoft way behind the curve compared to the competition.

But whether you choose the iPhone, Android, Microsoft, or another competitor such as the recently open-sourced Symbian, there are worse ways to make money than by developing a mobile application -- even if you do it on the side, rather than taking it up was your day job. If you can avoid the hundreds of me-too applications out there and do something truly original, perhaps you could even be the next Tapulous.

Not the imaginative type? Worry not, my developer friend. Such is the momentum behind this industry that you can even get away without having an original thought in your head. Organisations such as iPhoneAppQuotes are springing up to connect creative thinkers with the software developers who can make their ideas an reality. But my advice: if anyone comes to you suggesting the ultimate iCleavage app for the iPhone, you might want to think twice.

How do you find IT jobs these days? Back in the day, the print publications were the main source. The first section that most IT professionals turned to when they got Computer Weekly or other trade magazines in the mail was the jobs part at the back. These days, the Internet has taken over as the main source for job seekers, but the signs are that employers and recruiters may not be taking advantage of it as much as they could. And that's potentially damaging, because innovation in online recruitment is speeding up.

Thanks to the economic crash, and the effect on information-centric industries such as financial services, jobs in IT these days are still relatively hard to come by. Almost a third of recent graduates are unemployed, and more than a quarter of those that are in work gross under £10,000, according to CWJobs' recent survey of 5000 jobseekers.

No wonder, then, that IT workers are turning to the web, with its high volume and fast turnover, to track the latest opportunities. Around 70% of respondents use general job sites on the Internet with lots of different vacancies. Around half of all candidates look for job opportunities specifically on a potential employer's website. Just under half of them go to specialist industry web sites to find their next appointment.

Worryingly though, a third of candidates interviewed by CWJobs said that they received no response when submitting a job application online. As the survey points out, graduates who have less job seeking experience may well take that lack of response as a negative sign, and not bother trying again.

As one respondent said: "The key problem is receiving no response. It feels like my applications disappear down a black hole." By not acknowledging responses and feeding back, recruiters risk alienating a valuable segment of their potential candidate base.

While recruiters struggle to nail down even these basic online skills, social media is raising the stakes for candidates and employers alike.
 
Twitter has dramatically grown dramatically in significance in the past couple of years. Whereas it used to be a site for inane chatter about what you had for breakfast that morning, it is now a site both for that same inane chatter, and for more serious things, such as passing on news links, asking questions of your community - and finding jobs.

Take TwitJobSearch, for example. This tool aggregates job postings on Twitter into one easily searchable place. A quick look shows 2000 job postings harvested in a single hour. These are jobs across the world, and in many different sectors, but there is still plenty of opportunity for finding the position that fits you. The site lets you save jobs to your Twitter account, and add your online CV. It also highlights the recruiters who are savvy enough to be using Twitter to post new job opportunities (hello there, @jobs_in_the_uk, and @itjobsldn!)

Still, we have a long way to go before people realise the significance of sites such as Twitter. Facebook and LinkedIn were by far the most-used social media sites among the CW Jobs survey base.

LinkedIn is used more by contractors than permanent staff (roughly a half vs just over a third). This is probably because contractors need to score gigs far more regularly than full-timers, meaning that they have to network more. Services such as Twitter garnered around 10% in both camps.

But 29% of jobseekers surveyed say that they don't use social media sites at all, although given the incredible growth in the popularity of these sites, and the dire situation of the economy following the financial crisis, that is likely to change. As individuals begin to realize that it is possible to find jobs using these outlets, they're likely to catch on and begin firing up sophisticated (and free) social media management tools such as Hootsuite.

So, for recruiters and candidates alike, if you think that social media is for teenagers, now's the time to think again. The web will continue to play an increasingly important part in the recruitment process - and those who choose not to play will be missing out on a big opportunity. 

Well, Apple's iPad was something of a letdown, wasn't it? The most anticipated product since the iPhone launched onto the global stage not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with what can only be described as an embarrassed shuffle.

You could tell that things were starting to go awry even as Steve Jobs sat down in the comfy chair onstage to carry out the demo. He was scrolling happily through several web pages, blissfully ignoring the fact that the first one he went to - the New York Times - simply didn't work as it was intended. Why? Because apparently, just like its smaller brother, the iPad doesn't support Adobe Flash.



Tim Anderson wrote recently about the need to develop for the mobile Internet. Mobile search and location-based services will drive the mobile web. Mobile advertising has been growing slower than expected -- recently, research firm EMarketer anticipated a $1.1 billion spend by 2012. The financial downturn has slowed developments, but the potential for mobile Internet revenues is staring us in the face, nevertheless.

This is why Jobs' demo last Wednesday is so significant. The iPad is flawed in many respects. It has no camera. There are no standard ports on the thing. It costs more than many net books, and yet its operating system is locked down. But one of the biggest flaws is that without Flash, many of the sites that we would like to visit are not available.

Such is Adobe's chagrin that its platform evangelist Lee Brimelow published a list of websites including Google Finance, Disney, CNN, popular American media streaming site Hulu, and Facebook application Farmville. None of them were without Flash, meaning that none of them will work on the iPad.

Apple's decision to eschew Flash on the iPhone was irritating enough for Adobe, but to do it on a tablet device that Apple hopes will replace the laptop for many consumers sitting on the couch in the evenings is no less than a declaration of war. Adobe needs to promote itself in new markets like this one, where everything is at stake, and Apple is making it very difficult.

Adobe definitely has cause to worry. Apple's share of the mobile market is only 2.7%, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. On the other hand, it sold 99.4% of all mobile applications last year. People buying Apple's mobile devices use them in ways that users of other mobile platforms do not, and Adobe will be well aware of this, as will Microsoft, which offers the competing Silverlight technology.

And looming on the horizon is a potential game changer: HTML 5. This as-yet unratified technology is nevertheless being supported in its unratified perform in many browsers. It is vastly more functional than HTML 4. Web developers can display video using it, without having to resort to Flash. They can produce HTML-only pages that enable you to drag and drop anything, and edit any content. This is why Google Wave, the search engine giant's revolutionary new online messaging system, was built in HTML 5. It looks and feels like a desktop application.

HTML 5 cannot claim to do as much as Flash can, but it may do enough. Apple, which itself likes to dominate all aspects of its business, doesn't like it when other companies like Adobe dominate a single part of the online experience. What Jobs may have been imagining when he scrawled through that broken site last week was a world in which it used HTML 5 -- and in which Adobe was increasingly irrelevant.

What does that mean for IT professionals and web developers today? It means that understanding HTML 5 as it develops, and honing your skills in this exciting new technology, might not be a bad bet. As this new decade rolls on, you will find it looking more and more attractive on your CV.