Careers: Worker perks were all the rage before the dotcom bubble burst. Friday afternoon beer kegs. Pool tables in the office. The ubiquitous free soda. But, as John West explains, “fact is, most of us don’t work in an environment where this kind of employee comfort is necessary. Until a business case is made, it probably just isn’t going to happen.” So the question lingers: What can you do to keep folks motivated and happy? “I’ve got a few ideas tested by own experiences,” West writes. “No budget required.” Startups: Day 3 here, and OpenSpan steps into our spotlight with a promise of leviathan proportions. In the words of CEO Francis Carden, “who wouldn’t want to flip a switch and have all of their legacy apps and code extend into Web services and just plain services?” So, the company has not quite achieved that yet, but it is helping to get there by coming at applications via the presentation layer. OpenSpan: Beyond mashups. “What we do has never been done before,” Carden claims. View the slideshow displaying the Month of Enterprise Startups. Hardware: Responding to a Greenpeace report listing it as the most environmentally irresponsible tech company, Apple CEO Steve Jobs promises a greener Apple, saying the company will stop using arsenic and polyvinyl by the end of next year. Related: Jobs reveals future Mac(Book?)plans. The news beat: IBM offers a paid support option for DB2 Express-C, its free database. Spammers, always one step ahead, are eluding filters by using encrypted attachments, according to service provider Email Systems, thus attachment spam is up considerably in the past few months. And the Berlin city government rejects a proposal to migrate computers to open source. Careers