Plus: Hone Your BS-Detecting Skills, the World’s Stupidest Robots and a Seriously Fun-Looking Workspace.

Work E-Mail in 140 Characters or Less
By 2014, e-mail will be replaced by social networking applications like Twitter as the primary vehicle for business communication among 20 percent of employees, according to Gartner last week.

“In the past, organizations supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications only,” Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. “Today, social paradigms are converging with e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and presence, creating new collaboration styles.”

The lines will further blur between different modes of communication as products that were once separate are increasingly combined. “The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode,” Basso said. “E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities.”

According to the tech research firm, business e-mail providers like Microsoft will include links to both internal and external social networks in their services. As a result, hybrid software systems with both on-site and off-site services are expected to grow dramatically in the coming years.

Gartner analysts forecast that Research in Motion and Microsoft will have an 80 percent share of business e-mail services by 2012. The research firm says that by that time, contact lists, calendars and messaging clients in any smart phones will also be social-enabled applications.

World’s Stupidest Robot Competition
The annual Baca Robo (“Stupid Robot”) Contest took place in Budapest, Hungary late last month. There, contestants vied for a €2,000 (US$2,700) grand prize by displaying their utterly useless/silly creations, which were judged by the audience’s laughter.

Source: Plastic Pals via Engadget

Hone Your BS-Detecting Skills
Somewhere between vague mistruths and flat-out lies is BS. And most of us witness it on a consistent basis in the workplace.

BS usually comes in the form of “unnecessary deceptions, committed in the gray area between polite white lies and complete malicious fabrications,” as Scott Berkun, bestselling author of The Myths of Innovation, defines it. “BS is usually defined as inventions made in ignorance of the facts, where the primary goal is to protect oneself. For a variety of reasons BS can be hard to detect.”

Washington, D.C.-based venture capitalist Don Rainey offers six suggestions to help hone your BS-detecting skills at Business Insider. Here are a few abridged tips:

• Determine what serves the speaker’s self-interest. When someone is presenting a point of view, consider how that opinion might correlate to his or her own self-interest. There must be some reason that person has to make the argument to you in the first place. “And that reason more likely correlates with their own self-interest than with yours,” Rainey writes.
• Watch for truth-qualifying statements. “To tell you the truth” or “Let’s be frank” or “I have to be honest…” are all statements that bring up the question, “Are we starting to be honest just now?“
• Listen for name dropping. “Credibility should be derived from the strength of the argument, known facts and/or the reputation of the person present. If absent prominent people are the backbone of an argument,” Rainey writes, you should be suspicious.

“Successful people vary greatly in style and approach, but they commonly share an extraordinary ability to discern the truth,” Rainey concludes. “If you want to do well, develop a great B.S. meter … it will serve you every day.”

A Seriously Fun Workspace
For its World’s Coolest Offices 2010 feature, published last week, Inc.com breaks down its galleries into seven categories: Coolest Converted Office Spaces; Grand Flagship Headquarters; Innovative Office Interiors; Best Use of Space; Coolest Home Offices; Best Green Offices; and Work Inside-Work Outside Offices.

Our favorite office, from the “Best Use of Space” gallery, is Corus Entertainment‘s headquarters in Toronto, “a study in smart design (with a LEED Gold-targeted building), and a model for a quirky aesthetic to bring out the creativity in its employees.”

Credit: Quadrangle Architects Limited / Diamond and Schmitt Architects

“This building represents a cultural shift,” John Cassaday, Corus’s founding CEO, says. “It’s all about fun.”

Cheers.