However, as employees start taking more trips, companies becoming more global, employees have their desk in a plane, and social applications penetrate the corporate firewall, mobilizing the key functions they see at their desk will be invaluable and will bust open a completely brand new market. Looking into the good folks down the street, Research In Motion is developing their MVS 5.0. This will allow your BlackBerry to receive extension calls regardless of location with the incoming call. This will help reduce overall long distance charges and improve productivity by allowing employees to receive business calls on their devices.

Apple is thinking of similar innovations, but their major focus is going to be around video conferencing. Imagine being on a train, going home to pick up your kids, and you are communicating and seeing your fellow colleagues on a 4:30pm call. Given the versatility of the Apple platform, the video conferencing is suppose to be very intuitive and functional. The only major concern is the battery power, but that’s a different story.

Seeing these applications being built has brought about a lot of hype and excitement, but from mostly IT professionals and IT managers. Some employees are worried being “too connected to work” will cause them to be at the companies call 24/7. Where does the personal life come in. Are there controls that turns these functions off over the air at 5pm everyday? We know from research that your view might differ here depending on the year you were born. Gen Y consistently uses mobile technology for non-work tasks.

The major market here will be to package these with a social media interface that will allow users to control the functions, personalize the UI and help them make it as individual as possible.

But it’s not just students and schools that are disillusioned by the annual glut of [MBA] surveys and questionnaires. “There are too many separate rankings so employers suffer fatigue,” says Mike Dover, managing director at Socialstruct Advisory Group, a technology consulting firm in Toronto, and an MBA grad from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London. “It ends up being like professional boxing: There are too many belts for any one of them to mean anything.”

“ATLAS is a weekly portrait blog featuring interesting people, but there is more to it than that. Atlas can be approached as an information resource, a conceptual art project, and an experiment involving photography and social media…Conceptually, the project revolves around the idea of individualism and reaching to be the best you can be…Atlas studies these individuals and tries to figure out which conditions in their lives led to their accomplishments.”

This week I am honoured to be the featured profile on the ATLAS project.

One of the cool parts of ATLAS is the option to nominate someone you feel would make a great addition to the project. If you have a mentor, boss, coworker, family member or friend who is working on something cool, I’d highly recommend it. Eugen was great to work with, and I look forward to seeing this project grow and evolve.