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The spread of consumer technologies at work has put many IT departments on the back foot, but a conference in San Francisco this week is looking at ways IT managers can take back control and turn the chaos to their advantage.

IPads and smartphones are only the most visible consumer trends shaking up the workplace. Social networking, a proliferation of free online services and an expectation of slick, Google-like interfaces are all pressuring IT departments to rethink their game.

A decade ago, just 10 percent of devices in the workplace were "unsanctioned," or outside the control of the IT department, according to Dion Hinchcliffe, executive vice president of strategy at Dachis Group, a business consulting firm. Today, he said, it's at 30 percent and rising fast.

"We're only 20 percent away from most IT being outside the control of the IT department. That will make us not the IT department any more," he told the crowd at the Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise conference.

The answer: to embrace and control the consumer trends rather than try to fight them. "If you try to block it, it will go around you," Hinchcliffe said.

First Data, the big U.S. payments services provider, has armed 150 of its sales staff with iPads and will extend that to 800 by mid-year. It built a custom iPad 2 app that makes it easier for its staff to sell more of its products and get contracts signed more quickly.

"Our sales people carried around books and forms; they only sold a few of our products because the rest were too confusing," said Don Stockslager, vice president of boarding tools, strategy and support at First Data.

The app created a single access point for all of First Data's products. The reps create a profile for each customer and the app makes recommendations based on their buying history and preferences, and draws up a contract on the spot that the customer signs with a stylus.

"As soon as the customer lifts their pen, the data starts moving in the background and draws up the account," he said.

It took some work getting there. First Data created a service-oriented architecture on the back end to abstract away the complexity of the myriad systems the iPad app has to talk to.

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As Consumer Tech Sweeps Enterprise, IT Staff Fight for Control

NEW YORK (AP) The uproar over Rush Limbaugh's derisive comments about a young woman's sex life is serving as a vivid reminder of the outsize role conservative media stars play in Republican politics.

With a Democratic president in the White House and no leading GOP elected official setting the party's agenda, Limbaugh and other media personalities like the late Andrew Breitbart and even Donald Trump have filled a vacuum for many conservatives seeking a full-throated political advocate. The popularity of such figures among Republican core voters has made party leaders reluctant to cross them, even when their comments or tactics steer well out of bounds.

Democrats have plenty of left-leaning media figures in their corner, too some of whom have made comments that have embarrassed the party and its candidates. Bill Maher, who gave $1 million to a super PAC that supports President Barack Obama, was widely criticized recently for mocking NFL quarterback Tim Tebow's religious beliefs on Twitter.

But no liberal media figure has an audience the size of Limbaugh's, estimated as high as 20 million listeners mostly men per week. And no one suggests Maher or any other commentator has displaced Obama as the voice of the Democratic Party.

"The voices you hear on the conservative side have an audience of people who are very skeptical of traditional mainstream media and power," said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington who studies media in politics. "If you're a Republican candidate you don't want to offend those people. They are the most hard-core Republican voters and the most likely to turn out in a primary."

Such was the case last week, when the top GOP presidential candidates distanced themselves from Limbaugh but did not directly criticize him after he called 30-year old Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" on his radio show. Fluke had testified to Democratic members of Congress in support of a requirement that health care companies provide coverage for contraception. That requirement would compel her Jesuit college's health plan to cover her birth control.

Limbaugh offered an apology to Fluke on his website Saturday after sponsors began suspending advertising on his show, which is carried by 600 stations and is by far the most popular talk radio program in the U.S. He voiced regret on the air on Monday, too, but also said he was the victim of a double standard. He said, "Rappers can say anything they want about women. It's called art. And they win awards."

The controversy has been an inopportune tempest for Republican hopeful Mitt Romney, who has tried to focus on jobs and the economy but has found himself dealing with questions about social issues in recent weeks.

Romney said he wouldn't have used the language Limbaugh chose, but he refrained from directly criticizing him. The former Massachusetts governor has struggled in his efforts to cement his status as the front-runner in the field, in part because of the reluctance of many conservative voters to get behind his candidacy.

Rick Santorum called Limbaugh an "entertainer" who had license to be "absurd" sometimes, while Newt Gingrich dismissed the matter as a media distraction. Only Ron Paul took Limbaugh to task, telling CBS' "Face the Nation" that the commentator's language went over the top at times.

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Limbaugh and the GOP: The media stars and politics

I have a couple thousand "friends" on Facebook, and a few days ago I cyber-smacked one of them over the head like an ugly son-in-law. He had made what I thought was a very snarky, malicious comment about one of my awe-inspiring, earth-shattering posts. Such an offense I could not abide.

So, in defense of my opinions (more accurately, my ego), I took to the keyboard and let him have it in front of Mark Zuckerberg's 800 million Facebook users (That's right, if you haven't been paying attention, Facebook is now the third largest nation on the planet, exceeded only by the populations of India and China). But a day later I discovered it was a huge misunderstanding.

My friend had not aimed his comment at me; it was directed at someone else. Further, he was being more sarcastic than sinister, more playful than mean-spirited, but it just didn't communicate across the online superhighway. I apologized profusely and retreated to a corner of the World Wide Web with my foot, mouse, and keyboard in my mouth.

This whole incident, as minor as it turned out to be, is reflective of how we communicate and miscommunicate in the 21st century. For years I have noticed how people will say things in e-mails that they would never say to someone else's face (good and bad), and I often warn my children about this as their thumbs blaze across the QUERTY keypads of their cell phones.

"Social networking" sites greatly magnify the effect, an effect now known as "online dis-inhibition." We seem to lose our social restraint, our better judgment sometimes we lose our minds completely while hiding behind the pseudo-invisibility of the Internet and the digital airways.

A congressperson posts racy pictures to his account and scuttles his career; a middle-aged husband rattles all his marital skeletons online and ends up in divorce court; a high school football star loses his promised scholarship because of his Twitter rantings; a young woman can't land a job because prospective employers Google her and deem her a liability: These are the realities, virtual and otherwise, of today's world.

I don't want to sound like some crazed Luddite who hates technology and pines for the days of the rotary phone or the covered wagon. I love WI-FI, streaming video, GPS, downloadable audio, and satellites. These words you are reading were typed on a laptop computer I cannot live without, and I've received a dozen emails in the course of writing this column. No, I'm not ready to give up these things.

But neither am I ready to accept all of these technologies without some critique and discernment. While I now recognize the countless alternative ways we can connect with others, I also recognize that we are lonelier and more disconnected than ever. I can see that we are more aware of the world around us than any previous generation, and yet I see that we may be the most narcissistic generation to ever live in North America.

As "social networking" grows, it appears we must guard against real communication disintegrating, and the constant undermining of real, human connection. Technologies aside, we still need flesh-and-blood relationships, connections that are built upon mutual respect, actual time together, shared interests, and face-to-face conversation.

People of faith may have more at stake in this issue than most, because faith fails in a hyper-individualized, self-centered world. Faith only flourishes in the environs of an authentic, unselfish community, not a virtual imitation where people hide behind their avatars.

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Real Social Networking

Automakers have begun slowly integrating social networking into vehicles via advanced infotainment systems that provide voice-activated social functions. In a recent collaboration with Facebook called "Hackathon," Ford gave the world a glimpse of what in-car social networking 2.0 might look like. It's scary and intriguing at the same time.

One time, long, long ago, cars were a primary means of socialization. You hopped into your red sports coupe and went on a date; you gathered a group of friends and went driving in the town; you drove to visit family every week, month or holiday. In short, the car was the way to see those that were important to, you face to face.

These days, you carry a mobile phone with texting capabilities, you video chat with long-distance friends and family, and you update your crew about your life instantaneously via Facebook and other networking websites. The car no longer plays a primary role in keeping you in touch and social. In fact, studies show that young people increasingly prefer smartphones over vehicles - the once timeless glamor of the first car is all but extinct.

Automakers are quite aware of this trend and are shrugging off potential dangers in an effort to make the car more social than ever. The Ford Sync system includes functions like voice-activated text messaging and in-vehicle smartphone app integration, which extends to Twitter updates.

At the Hackathon event last month, a team of Ford and Facebook programmers spent 24 hours brainstorming and hacking together advanced social functions that they believe could take the Sync system to the next level of in-vehicle socialization. The team created a vehicle in which Facebook integration was more than just a robotic voice reading updates. Facebook became intertwined with traditional vehicle functions like GPS and radio.

One of the functions the team worked on was a navigation system capable of not only supplying the driver with locations of nearby restaurants, but sorting those restaurants based on Facebook friend likes. So, you could eat at that hot new restaurant all your friends are talking about with hardly any effort. Another program could provide location updates for your friends, and automatically navigate you to them (kinda stalkerish if you ask us). A music function would let you automatically tune in to the music that your friends are playing.

Ford said the best ideas will find their way into official R&D channels, where they'll be further developed. It ended its blog post about the event by promising the driver's "first priority will always be to remain focused on driving and making it safely to your destination." However, features like in-vehicle Facebook run the risk of creating cognitive distractions, which studies show can be as dangerous as manual distractions like dialing a cell phone.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has been quoted in the past as saying that things like Facebook have no place in the car. The Department of Transportation released the first phase of voluntary guidelines last month, that begins to address what automakers should and should not be doing in terms of vehicle technologies. The list is largely focused on manual-based technologies like Internet browsing and text messaging, but later phases will deal with things like voice-based texting and social networking. Functions like those dreamed up at Hackathon could very well end up on the wrong side of safety regulations.

Whatever becomes of the work, you can see all the brainstorming, coffee chugging and carpal tunnel-inducing keyboarding that went on behind the scenes below.

Source: Ford

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Ford teams with Facebook to make 'social' car

The "Facebook of China" Renren Inc. ( RENN , quote ) has announced the release of Renren HD, thefirst social networking application selected by Microsoft ( MSFT , quote ) for its Windows 8 application store.

The application was released at the Windows 8 Consumer Preview Conference held during the Mobile World Congress 2012 inBarcelona, Spain.

Renren HD is designed to be fully-integrated with Windows 8, a generational change on Microsoft's flagship operating system. Windows 8 focuses on tablet usage and integration with social networks, so the application has adopted tiled Metro-style user interfaces and the ability to share content from a wide range of different applications with a single click.

"We are very proud to be selected as the first SNS partner for Microsoft's new Windows store," said Joseph Chen, CEO of Renren. "Renren shares the vision of Windows 8 in its aspiration to revolutionize how content is delivered and shared between the next generation of digital devices. Renren HD was designed with the same philosophy."

Renren Inc. operates the leading real name social networking internet platform inChina. Its sites cover social networking, gaming, commerce, and video sharing. Renren had approximately 137 million activated users as ofSeptember 30, 2011.

Investors looking to invest in Renren and other Chinese internet ventures should look at the Global X Social Media Index ETF ( SOCL , quote ), which puts 4.56% of its holdings into Renren shares.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

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First Windows 8 social networking app is Chinese