I've been out of corporate life since December '08, working on a start-up idea. I can now share more details about it, because the idea just got squashed by ESRI at the 2009 UC.

cloudatum is building a GIS cloud-computing provisioning platform that connects citizens and municipalities with mapping data & technology, with the end goal of identifying place-based civic improvement projects in cities and local jurisdictions. The complete end-to-end platform includes:

A GIS server and data provisioning platform to various cloud-computing utilities. This platform supports GIS server architecture template publishing, standards-based geodata publishing, data reconciliation scripting, and it aggregates municipal geodata, manages cartographic consistency, and makes municipal maps available to Web browser and iPhone users to collect additional place-based improvement observation data.
A community SaaS Web site where cloudatum members can create, edit, review, and comment on citizen-collected map data observations, along with and a voting and sharing social networking framework
An iPhone client to support in-the-field geodata collection
A set of RESTful web services for consuming and publishing – enabling municipal geodata to be published, and enabling other mobile & Web developers, bloggers, and microbloggers to consume and promote additional creations

I had validated the idea with 4 different cities (all ESRI customers) who are/were aboard conceptually, and I had also talked to ESRIs mobile and ArcGIS Online product managers - they were supportive too, which makes sense to me now. Welp, on to my next idea.