Reccomended reading, therefore: Empowering non-organizations (2): Pockets, and previous related work.

The real headline stat: 3,500. That's how many newspaper jobs were lost since late May. McClatchy leads the march to the bottom, with 1,400 positions cut, according to the Silicon Alley Insider. Also, newspapers have collectively lost close to $4 billion in shareholder value ... in July!

The media market is in an interesting place right now. On the one hand, newspapers are continuing their slow death. They seem to be kept afloat, in part, by the fact that the world is still figuring out how to make a financial success of delivering the news over the web. The technology is in place, but the business model is still being refined. While smaller news outlets may be able to pull it off, the large media firms need to find a way to replace declining print revenue and grow the web in a way that not only breaks even but continues to deliver net growth.

We're still not there yet.

Once the business issues sort themselves out-- with the help of a few savvy entrepreneurs and natural market forces-- the newspaper decline will accelerate. The only question is: what's coming next?

Sumox propose des services d'assistance informatique à distance. Par le biais d'un simple formulaire, vous indiquez vos coordonnées, votre problème et l'heure à laquelle vous souhaité être contacté. Un technicien vous rappelle à l'heure dite, se connecte sur votre ordinateur et tente de résoudre le problème.

On le comprend vite, le principal challenge d'un business comme celui-ci concerne la sécurité. Personne n'aurait recours à un tel service sans avoir de solides garanties à ce niveau-là, et Sumox l'a bien compris: connexion 128 bits sécurisée, possibilité pour le client de déconnecter le technicien à tout moment ou encore autorisation du client nécessaire pour que la connexion puisse être établie. Le système est très bien pensé.

Financièrement, le business model est très intéressant: le technicien prend les détails de votre carte de crédit au début de l'appel (c'est peut-être le point le plus sensible) et commence à facturer une fois la connection établie. La facturation s'arrête quand le client confirme que le problème a été résolu, et ne paie ainsi que le temps exact nécessaire à la résolution du problème. Si le problème n'est pas résolu, le client ne paie rien.

Couverture géographique mondiale (mais trois langues disponibles uniquement, du moins pour le moment), une vaste gamme de produits couverts (harware et software), je pense qu'il y a là de quoi développer un très beau business. La principale barrière à l'entrée sera probablement la confiance des utilisateurs, qui pourrait mettre du temps à venir.

En définitive, le seul reproche que l'on pourrait adresser à Sumox est que les Mac ne sont pour l'instant pas couverts. Mais bon, dans la mesure où les Mac n'ont pas de problèmes, ça n'est au fond pas bien dramatique ;)

Scoopit!

Earlier this year the US investment bank, Bear Stearns, suffered a massive collapse of confidence and was taken over by J P Morgan. At the time Bear Stearns was the 5th largest US investment bank. Adam posted a couple of times on the international media coverage, as he though some of the local coverage was not that great. These posts are here and here.

There has been a knock on effect, compounding the sub-prime debacle.

Adam has long had an interest in business and business history, so was extremely interested to find this lengthy, but absorbing article on the collapse of Bear Stearns on the Vanity Fair website.

The article lead-in is as follows:-

On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players—Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers—in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history

The article reviews the events that took place and concludes as below:-

Today, many of Bear Stearns’s former employees are out of work. The firm has effectively disappeared into the maw of J. P. Morgan along with a number of key executives, including Ace Greenberg, who became a Morgan vice-chairman, and Alan Schwartz, who will probably take a position in the investment-banking department.

Maybe the S.E.C. will figure out whether Bear was murdered. But maybe it won’t. Even those who believe the firm was the victim of a predatory raid have their doubts it can ever be proved.

“Even with subpoena power, I’m not sure the S.E.C. will get to the bottom of this, because the standard of proof is just so difficult,” says a vice-chairman at another major investment firm. “But I hope they do. Because you can look at this as just another run on a bank or as a seminal point in the financial history of this country that could bring about a change, perhaps a drastic change, in the way we govern financial markets. If there is a solution to this kind of thing, it must be found in the roots of what happened at Bear Stearns. Because otherwise, I can guarantee you, it will happen again somewhere else.”

Note the last sentence, which Adam has highlighted in bold.

It is to be hoped that we do not see too many of these incidents, but yet currently we have the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac crisis which may be yet another symptom of the way markets function today. So a review may well be timely.

The article is by Bryan Burrough, whose name may ring a bell with some readers, as it did with Adam.

The brief background below will explain why:-

Bryan Burrough, the critically acclaimed co-author of Barbarians at the Gate, is considered one of the United States leading journalists. Some readers may well remember that book on the takedown of RJR Nabisco, which was subsequently made into a TV mini-series.

A special correspondent at Vanity Fair for the last twelve years, and formerly a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Burrough has earned a reputation for infusing his writing with a sense of mystery, humor and humanity. He has written on a wide variety of subjects, from Hollywood to NASA, from murder mysteries in Israel to one of his latest efforts, tracing the Bush Administration's path to war in Iraq for Vanity Fair this spring.

Another of his books and one Adam remembers finding fascinating was Vendetta:American Express and the smearing of Edmond Safra.

There is a video also of the author discussing the article.

So for those who enjoy reading about business and who want to see behind the headlines, see the video, read the article and let Adam know what you think.

Scoopit!

Google a lancé hier Knol, une alternative à Wikipedia qui permettra aux auteurs des articles d’être rémunérés. Chaque article sera créé par un groupe d’auteurs qui pourront toucher les revenus des encarts AdSense places sur la page. D’autres utilisateurs pourront modifier ces pages mais ces modifications devront être modifiées par les auteurs d’origine avant d’être publiées. Un Wikipedia avec modération en quelque sorte.

Sources : TechCrunch en français

Sushi for your thoughts

Essentially, their PR agency rounded up almost a dozen of people and invited us to dinner yesterday to tell us about LinkedIn upcoming news and comment their ideas. Curiosity, a nice venue, a flattering invitation, and there you had us: as disparate a collection of bloggers, social networkers and community builders as you can shake a stick at, including some old acquaintances. At first I was quite nonplussed about the selection criteria, but as the evening wore on and people chatted, I found out every single one was directly or indirectly interesting for LinkedIn. Because ninety percent of the time we were doing the talking, and LinkedIn the listening and note-taking.

The prosaic part

Kevin told us some interesting things about their their business model and the (relatively) mild effect of the recession on people's need of their services, and also of where they're going. Most of what he said about that will either be in the news today or is widely known, but some of it may be relevant:

OpenSocial apps: pre-qualification and revenue. He confirmed that a number of apps based on OpenSocial are coming fast, and they look forward to more. They will be using the Apple model, though, and will vet any aspiring application. Also, Kevin said they're not closed to any business models and could contemplate allowing apps that charge per use. Just as long as they "add value to the professionals" using LinkedIn. They don't look kindly on advertising, though.

Profiled news and more: NY Times agreement. Working on previous agreements, they're adding others to "allow professionals to find the people they know that are related with a news article". That's something I want to see in action.

Mobility (and iPhone). They already have an iPhone app, and they want to put the network where the user is. Again, something useful.

Translation found. They plan to start with the interface, the user guides and then "other elements" of the site. Not the content, though. We had an interesting talk about filtering and multilanguage sites which I hope gets taken into consideration.

Groups: the real change. Here is where it really got interesting. They vowed to bring real firepower to their "groups" feature (essentially, forums), not just to the administration side but also to the content features. Sharing and publishing elements will become possible. Also, it was interesting to hear about their strategy for creating groups for specific companies (as opposed to domain-oriented ones).

New services: pay for pestering. They also commented some of the changes (group directory, polls). They were consistent with the LinkedIn model of making the reasonable free, and charge for the irksome: now, you can pay for sending a poll to any particular demographic. Something that would generate lots of spam if it were free is sold as prized service... and in the process, grows scarce enough to not bother users.

The vision: a "knowledge network"

The thing I like about LinkedIn is the clear vision, though, and it showed at the event. No growth per se, no diluting initatives, and a clear focus on adding value for the professionals that use the service (and capturing some of it). Kevin explained their aim to become a "knowledge network" where professionals could find answer to their professional needs, both networking and exchanging practical knowledge, and he explained the role their new Groups will play in their model.

Do I like it? Definitely. So much so that the latest Macuarium.com business model rests on the very same tenets they're now aiming for: a core of shared conversations and knowledge, and criss-crossing professional services adding value and difference from other communities of practice. We already have the communities, after all. The problem is, we don't have the money (or time to go search for it) to finish the building :-). So progress is slow and sometimes backwards.

LinkedIn should have it hard, but can probably make it. Their professional networking services are not well-known in Spain, since they are very English- and IT-oriented; there is home-grown and imported competition on the ground as well as little general understanding of the differences between a social network and a professional one. That could even be an advantage, as it keeps the membership bar high and thus the demographic more interesting than in rival services. But it will slow their growth.

Their Groups focus (conversations instead of simply networks) will change them more than they seem to realize. A community is not a network, and whereas most people use LinkedIn to reflect, track and use their (offline) agendas, an online community creates new relationships without an offline reference. The focus changes from outside to inside the service... or if you prefer, the network grows in depth.

I pick your brains, you pick mine

So, while I think they got their money's worth of ideas on "how to make the service relevant to Spanish bloggers" (including too many comments from yours truly, who would never admit to such classification) and raised the awareness of their services among some quite well connected opinion-builders (and others :-)), I can't say I'm sorry to have had my brain picked. There were many nice people and interesting conversations, and learning about LinkedIn's vision and business model (and their practical application at a time of evolution) was absolutely worth sleeping only three hours last night.

There was a lot to learn indeed, and there will be more. They're doing things very well, and I mean the thinking not the execution (which is not bad either). And with their drive to become a "knowledge network" they're coming right onto a turf that I'm working on and intend to play with for a long time. Thankfully, their demographic and ours don't overlap completely :-).

One of the most unexpected things I learnt was how they went about picking people's brains. I don't think LinkedIn expected us to blog compulsively about their arrival in Spain; publicity may have been a goal (they got a bit), but not the core one. I think last night they wanted ideas to make it better. And I think they (and all of us) got some.

$1 = 10 NIS or shekel = dime. Approximately.

I looked at a basic $35 Duplo starter set (319 NIS) and a basic $25 Lego box (269 NIS).  At Toy R Us.

And, the neighboring bookstore would be glad to sell me a $29 Jansport pack for 250 NIS.

I hate to promote shopping in New York, Orlando or Los Angeles over Shfayim, but Hey Mr. Import Man, play the dollar for me.

• Shopping in Jacksonville, Destin, Daytona Beach, Pensacola, St. Augustine, Northeast Florida
• Shopping in Seattle, Tacoma, Olympic Peninsula, Washington and The Cascades
• Shopping in Honolulu, Waikiki and Oahu, Hawaii

Subscription models are unfortunately very difficult to sustain and often companies must taint their site with worthless advertising just to pay the bills.  It's my assumption that a lot of the websites advertising online are hoping to make money from advertising - advertising for advertisers.  Paying money to advertise so you can make money from advertisements - this is absurd!!!  At some point this advertising model has to break and people have to suck up the $30

Maybe some of you heard about it... or already read the paper... one more interesting argument in the never ending discussing about piracy...

There is a global industry that produces a huge variety of creative goods in markets larger than those for movies, books or music and does so without strong copyright protection. Competition, innovation, and investment, however, remain vibrant. That industry is fashion.

We all know the fashion industry is one of the most creative and innovative industries out there. So fashion firms show precisely the opposite behavior of that predicted by the standard theory of copyrights that predicts extensive copying will destroy the incentive for new innovation.

So why, when major content industries have increasingly powerful copyright protections for their products, does fashion design remain mostly unprotected - and economically successful?

This paradox analyse Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman in an article named: "THE PIRACY PARADOX: INNOVATION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN FASHION DESIGN" in the Virgina Law Review.

They argue that the fashion industry counter-intuitively operates within a low-copyright equilibrium in which copying does not deter innovation and may actually promote it. The paper offers a model explaining how the fashion industry's piracy paradox works, and how copying functions as an important element of and perhaps even a necessary predicate to the industry's swift cycle of innovation.

The paper is quite long (92 pages), but you don`t have to read the whole paper to get the message. Piracy is an issue an industry can deal with under some circumstances...

At a conference of The New Yorker (May 2008 ) one of the authors Kal Raustiala talked together with Scott Hemphill and James Surowiecki about the effect pirated goods have on the fashion industry. See the video here or download the podcast on itunes.

If you can avoid a trip to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to renew your passport - avoid it! Most adults can renew by mail. The problem is the under 21 crowd. You can get all the relevant details on the US Embassy Website, except for this one:

Nothing is allowed into the embassy. Cellphone, food, reading material - absolutely nothing. Just the passport and related documents. It has become their business model - food is sold at 3x prices and checking cellphone, etc. is a pain.

SO, leave everything in the car and have a good meal before. Bring your spouse, not only because you must, but because with no book to read - you may find the quality time valuable.

If you can postpone the trip until after Jan 20, 2009 you will not have to look at George Bush's picture.

• Spas in Boston, Cape Cod, Newport, Connecticut, Coastal Massachusetts and Rhode Island
• Spas in Vail, Aspen, Telluride, Steamboat Springs and the Colorado Rockies
• Spas in Burlington, Stowe, Rutland and the New Hampshire and Vermont Mountains

So, that should make our readers a little sympathetic to ElAl's annoucement that they are raising fares by 5% (more). Our more pro-active readers will pay for their tickets fast. Tickets purchased before July 14th get the old price.

• Getting to Palm Springs, Death Valley and the California Desert
• Getting to Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland
• Getting to Woodstock, Cooperstown, New Paltz, Catskills and Hudson Valley
• Getting to San Francisco Bay Area, Carmel, Napa Valley, Central California Coast

- make the food out of LDPE (low density polyethylene). That would be plastic instead of rubber and stone. Or just serve popcorn only.

- Take the medals and military-style ranks off pilots uniforms

- Stop selling duty free

- Pay people to do what all travelers know - pack light and go to the bathroom before the trip

• Fall Foliage in Vail, Aspen, Telluride, Steamboat Springs and the Colorado Rockies
• Fall Foliage in Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Cheyenne Wyoming and the Eastern Rockies
• Fall Foliage in Philadelphia, Lancaster, the Poconos, Eastern Pennsylvania
• Fall Foliage in Durango and Four Corners of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado

There's one day left. One day left to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog for free. At midnight, July 20, the streaming miniseries will be gone.

So, why should the media care about a fictional singing supervillian doing his laundry and writing blogs? Because, this experiment in broadcast proves how popular some innovations can be.

Consider this: I can watch these free episodes as many times as I want, as long as the site doesn't crash or my internet doesn't lag. However, there are also iTune downloads available for a couple dollars each. Being a huge Whedon fan, I had a couple of choices. I could watch the show for free until Sunday then buy the DVD when it comes out. I could, of course, watch the show for free and then never see it again. Or, I could buy the downloads from iTunes and have them to watch whenever I like and keep them after the free viewing period.

Instead, I chose a fourth option. I watched the episodes for free, downloaded them for $2 each, and I plan on buying the DVD when it comes out.

Why? I love Joss Whedon. I love that he gave me choices in how I consume his content. I love that he gets this age. Instead of hemming and hawing about how he might lose money, about how he needed to get a range of opinions and advice before he started, about how the quality of his product would go down if he created something for the web, he did it and was successful. And, yet, all of the papers and studios mired in the old way of doing things are going to continue to spin around in circles until they all fall down.

Whedon even makes it painless to find graphics and other resources for people like us to post content in our own blogs about Dr. Horrible's blog. Of all the director's I've ever been a fan of, Whedon has always been the most fan friendly, using the internet and anything else available to get fans involved in his shows. (I still have prizes I won for participating in the Browncoats when his movie Serenity came out. Years later, and there's a still an online community rallying around the film and keeping each other updated on news and events.) Why can't we do this with our own brands?

After reading the post about the musical episodes on Changing Way, I decided to add my own two cents.

Paidcontent reports from MusicTank’s Face To Face With The Millennials conference in London where Terry McBride (Manager of Avril Lavigne) said: ”There’s about a $2 million cheque waiting for her for all her YouTube plays.”

Of course it`s one of this extreme examples (Avril has nearly 100 mio views... most ever on YouTube) but it shows... there is much more potential in "ad supported channels" for artists than just using it as a "promo tool".

One of the topics I discuss is business models. In core of business is trade: You have something to sell, I want it, we trade it (when for money, we call this transaction, when for something, barter). You may also refer to this system as needs relationship. Today we also observe a new form of needs relationship, that of Consumer-to-business (C2B). One of the most common definitions of C2B is that this is an e-commerce business model in which consumers offer products and/or services to companies that pay for it. CB is therefore a 180˚ shift of the traditional (B2C) business models. We also call this the inverted business model. Inverted business models emerge under the influence of two main developments:
1- The rise of the current web (web2.0) with keywords such as interaction, participation, transparency and community building has an impact on two-way communication and value web creation (in contrast to the traditional value chain),
2- The downfall of costs of technology. Individuals now have access to technology and applications that used to be restricted to companies due to the costs.
Due to these developments, people are empowered to create their own digital environment. Consequently, (some) people will use that empowerment to also create a certain commercial environment.

Another way to look at C2B can be found in research, conducted by Chen, Leen and Chuang*: “Compared to the three frequently mentioned models: B2B, B2C, and C2C, which are now very popular, the progress of the other one (i.e., C2B) is far left behind; it is seldom seen on the Internet. A possible reason for this situation is the high transaction cost. It takes effort to unify a group of buyers’ common needs and preferences and to interact between the buyer’s party and the potential venders in order to complete a transaction. Moreover, it is not clear how to do it; there is little research into this problem”.
The authors further state that C2B is mainly a matter of collective buying processes, e.g. participating in organized leisure travel; in this case, the consumer will modify his personal whishes because of the lower price that has been negotiated collectively with the offerer.

In his thesis, Alexander Osterwalder states**: “A business model is a conceptual tool that contains a set of elements and their relationships and allows expressing a company’s logic of earning money. It is a description of the value a company offers to one or several segments of customers and the architecture of the firm and its network of partners for creating, marketing and delivering this value and relationship capital, in order to generate profitable and sustainable revenue streams”.
Strangely enough, it is hard to find definition of C2B that are not company-centered but more consumer-centered. Currently I am conducting a literature study of, what I would like to call, ‘real’ C2B: consumers proposing to businesses, specifically in social media. We’ll see what the values are

* An agent-based model for consumer-to-business electronic commerce, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, October 2006.

** The business model ontology, a proposistion in a design science approach, University of Lausanne, 2004.

Knowledge is a Public Good, and so are scientific discoveries based upon previous knowledge that open the door to technological innovations, thus improving our lives (or at least to those who can afford them). In previous posts was explain the nature of Public Goods and some of the problems that arise during the production process. 

If we understand that first we should worry about how to generate those breakthroughs and as a second step how to distribute their benefits among society, we might be interested in new ways of organizing the innovation production (something we already done in CBPP). In particular, this post is a review of what is known as  "Open Innovation" (OI). 

The technological jump given (mainly) in the last century has lead to the democratization of knowledge and information. Nowadays, media rely each time more on communication means that emerged or evolved in the last couple of decades and reach not only faster but cheaper to the public. New technologies are also employed in education and as a tool of academic divulgation. I'm not being too original if I say that today, more than ever in the developed world Knowledge is owned by no one, but it belongs to everybody. 

With the "Open Innovation" concept, Henry Chesbrough remarked the obviquity of the technology that unlocks the access to the masses to a great amount of contains, only available for a minority before, by drastically reducing the time between requesting and obtaining information. 

This framework of knowledge, easy reachable to everyone, gives place to the following situation: if firms want to insure their survival in the market they ought to buy, license and even merge with other companies in order to obtain the "know-how" or the technologies to be able to compete face to face against other firms. In other words, firms can't blindly trust only on their own R&D, if they want to remain alive they have to apply the popular saying: "if you can't lick them, join them". Moreover, from the O.I. point of view, organizations should try to sell the part of internal research not directly applicable to their business model to others that could find it interesting.

Giving a thoroughly thought to Chesbrough's terminology, this is only labeling already existing interactions between firms. Though, this doesn't mean we shouldn't give a deeper analysis to the subject. 

First, it's important to consider that if he was talking about O.I., there must be some concept referring to "Closed Innovation". Defining the latter it's easy, just consider one firm limiting its innovation to that produced by its own R&D department with little influence from outside. 

Second, what are the advantages of the "Open Innovation"? Answering may sound also redundant, but obviously using other people's discoveries or advances saves the company all the associated expenses involved in the process, among others: risk of the research uncertain outcome, time spent on getting inspiration, creativity and originality of the project, execution, development and implementation. To put it simply, we are talking about a R&D externalization method to avoid the costs described above. 

Apart from that, we should think of the advantage of arriving late. It's well known that "who hits the first, hits twice" (popular saying, again). But in the technological market, where first trials are hardly successful, a firm could save a lot of money learning from its competitors mistakes and so skipping a market fiasco for instance, due to technical reasons (click here for a couple of examples) or market maturity (remember Newton?). 

Furthermore, acquiring other's companies developments could be the starting point to create their own. Thereby, they save the base technology R&D and they can invest that money in producing a flashy new invention. Mostly, the O.I. model promotes firms' cumulative innovation. 

Nonetheless, continuing with the proverbs, "all that glitters is not gold". Clearly, a firm can't only opt for implementing O.I. as its innovation strategy, because drawbacks of this can be founded easily. Open Innovation may represent loss of control of the research development. In the case of non-generic or non-base technology this fact might be crucial, since the firm should contemplate the expenses of buying the license and also customizing to its business model. As a result, they should evaluate if they are really saving money hiring external R&D and if they want to position themselves as leader company or not,  which is the case of Apple's latest hit the iphone and ipod touch, which rely their success on using technology none of the firms in the market was implementing. 

Aside from that, O.I. does not implies firms are saving license, partnership or patent costs, which for instance in the software business may arrive to millionaire amounts. Besides, they will still have to adapt the innovation to their internal structure, what can be translated into: the extra cost of hiring someone to do it for them or the cost of doing the customization by themselves.    

In a nutshell, an as a way of concluding this post, we could say "Open Innovation" is the business model in which the firm determines what external information to bring inside, and what internal information to take outside.

:: Some companies promoting open innovation include Procter & Gamble, Innovation Exchange, NineSigma, InnoCentive, yet2.com, and IBM. ::

As the iPhone 3G launch parties continue to work their way around the globe its worth considering what it all means from the perspective of your network.

Recently there have been a number of news reports (like this one) that focus on what the iPhone will cost users here and around the world. In Australia consumers have been quick to lambast mobile carriers for not providing an unlimited data plan. In Canada, a similar flurry of angst was directed at the sole iPhone provider Rogers for its lack of an unlimited mobile plan. It almost seems like a reasonable demand considering the reports that fear of bill shock is keeping typical mobile phone data usage low.

Yes, other phones have had Internet capabilities for a long time, and my blackberry has helped solve a number of bar-room arguments, but the iPhone with its mobile OSX platform is a game changer.

Consider this scenario, a user wants a quick online experience to check a movie session time, the weather or to kill some time watching youtube. Even with the existing 3G laptop solutions, it's not always practical to pull out a computer, particularly in crowded areas. The natural genius of the iPhone is how perfectly it is suited for short blasts of Internet. The intuitive interface greatly improves the experience of browsing the web, videos and pictures, all without developing blackberry thumb.

More concerning however, is the new applications that the iPhone brings to the table; iSlsk is a peer-to-peer client for the iPhone. It connects users to the Soulseeker network where ever they happen to be. Without an unlimited plan, this could destroy a data cap in no time. However, with an unlimited plan, the usage (and impact) of such a user could be dire.

The demand for unlimited data-plans on iPhones is a sign of the imminent collision of the Internet and the walled-garden of the mobile phone services environments. The result will be an explosion in the number of mobile services to choose from, and a rapid decrease in the value in traditional mobile services.

Ask yourself this: Why would I send an SMS when I can send an email for free? Why pay for mobile video content when I can watch free content from the net? This shift in the source of a mobile service could place further stress on mobile operators who still appear to believe that any increase in data usage is a step in the right direction.

While the shift from fixed line phones to mobiles has been occurring for a number of years, the shift towards mobile forms of data communication from fixed line broadband is only just getting underway here in Australia (which should not be confused with Austria, where mobile broadband is already replacing wireline broadband). It’s a replay of the challenges of upgrading data networks to support the transition from 56K to broadband Internet access. With current generation phones, EDGE/GPRS services peak at only a few hundred kbps; In contrast, 3G HSDPA data are predicted to deliver 14 Mbps soon. With such a rapid increase in access speeds, I think that we're going to see increased 3G backhaul roll outs across the landscape.

The supporting statistics coming out of the US are startling. Steve Jobs mentioned during Apple's "World Wide Developer Conference" 2008 that 98% of iPhone users are making use of the web-browsing functionality.

The growth in mobile Internet has led to AT&T announcing that the iPhone 3G will provide speeds of up to 1.4Mbps peak download speeds (other AT&T devices are promoted as having speeds of up to 7.2Mbps), it is widely suggested that this is an indication that AT&T will cap the speed of the iPhone.

It is clear that mobile backhaul is in for a huge shake up. Suddenly Gigabit Ethernet links for mobile backhaul become necessary, and a near-term network upgrade program.

Now before you dismiss this post, and attribute the sheer volume of recent media articles to hype, I’d invite you to go and play with an in-store demo unit. Especially now, as you'll have a few things to think about while you’re checking it out.

Christopher Barnatt is the author of explainingcomputers.com and Associate Professor of Computing and Organizations in Nottingham University Business School. His series explaining computers, Web 2.0, and Cloud Computing allow both novice learners and experts the opportunity to add information to their own knowledge base. Barnatt's style of delivering his messages is unpretentious, completely thorough, and very approachable.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing according to Christopher is where "data, software applications, or computer processing power are accessed from a "cloud" of online resources."

1. Cloud Computing permits individual users to access their data and applications from any device.

2. Businesses can reduce their "capital" costs by purchasing software and hardware as a "utility" service rather than buying the technologies outright

SaaS aka Software As A Service

"Cloud computing is closely associated with Web 2.0 and a key element of both trends is the emergence of online applications aka SaaS." SaaS allows small businesses to access the same computing power and applications as large corporations without having to spend giant sums of money to own these technologies

HaaS aka Hardware As A Service

Hardware as a service allows businesses to purchase "computer processing capacity" over the web.

Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service allows users to pick and choose from a ala carte menu the services and storage products necessary for them to perform their tasks online at the highest cost savings available

Google's "App Engine" service allows developers to run web applications on Google's infrastructure

HaaS Advantages Amazon EC2 aka Elastic Compute Cloud

1. Elastic: allows users to increase or decrease their hardware requirements within minutes

2. Flexible: because each user can choose the specification of each "individual instance" of computing power purchased

3. Inexpensive: no capital investment (purchasing outright technologies) is required

4. Reliable: EC2 uses Amazon's "proven data centers" and "network infrastructure

Trend For Cloud Computing

The trend of Cloud Computing has been compared, according to Christopher, to the "development of the electricity network 100 years ago." At that time companies stopped having to create their own electricity and were able to "plug into a national electricity grid."

Cloud Computing represents the same model as individuals and business organizations can connect to a Cloud of computing resources.

Utility Computing aka Cloud Computing

No software installations are necessary. No hardware installations are necessary. No capital expenditures.

Cloud Computing Devices: What are they and what are the benefits?

1. Low Power, Low Cost

2. "Cloud Book" a device that has been dubbed a "computing appliance"

a.) Easy to use, easy to learn, ready to use

What Does This All Represent?

1. Return to Centralization: An age where "data, applications, and processing power are largely remote from the user interface device."

Analysis: This levels the playing field between small and large business, creates less drain on user assets, and it signals a collaboration of assets and knowledge on a world wide scale

2. Centralized resources could spell "doom" for the Microsoft business model where licensing and software products are pushed out to individual boxes. The era of loading software to an individual machine, maintaining the most current software operating systems, purchasing upgrades, and being forced to make expenditures on new software when the old software was still highly serviceable are going to be over

I'm also reading "The E-Myth Revisited" (a recommendation from by brother, who has a purer enterpreneurial spirit than I do), and I "get it" about how successful businesses set out to (or after faltering, make the strategic decision to) build a business that's not a cult of personality or based on one person's unique expertise.  it has to be repeatable, expandable, and documented procedurally well enough so that if I'm Joe Businessman or Investor, I think, "Hey, I could do that."

So, will be talking about what that means for a fledgling business and one that's a little more complicated than the pie shop example the author (Micheal E. Gerber) uses throughout the book.

I have wrung my hands here, repeatedly in fact, over whether I'm adding value to the conversation.

Yes, says Umair Haque and his colleagues at Havas Media Lab. They've put out a paper called "The New Economics of Consumption: User Generated Context." In it, they argue that user-generated content is in short supply, but what the market has lots of is user-generated context. Huh?

Take Content Ninja's blog. A lot of what I offer here is my riff on the stuff I read in my feeds -- good points made by bright minds in the field and then I analyze and expand (or try to) on them. What I'm doing is adding context to someone else's content.

Haque et al. suggest that media's future lies not in figuring out how to get user-generated content and use it for little or nothing.  The key is to put content out there that generates a contextual discussion. That discussion is important for two reasons: 1) It's proof that your content is of value to users, and 2) the value of the context comes not from individual users but from the collective discussion.

"A naked rating, ranking, or review on its own has little value or meaning – but millions of them, in
the aggregate, weave complex and multilayered webs of meaning. Put another way, context is the result of the complex, multilevel, network effects that happen when millions of consumers connect," they write.

And the context is specific to a community or network. Outsiders won't get it. Think of it as a circle. Give the community content of value to members, and they'll want to provide context of value to the community.

The white paper goes on to discuss how this viewpoint can be used to change the way advertising, business models and media strategy are done. How that works is less clear to me, but I'm sure Haque and his folks will have more to say.

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• The Value of Online Conversations

 If you want to see what my autoresponder does? You can check it out at either www.itvsman.com  or www.fonziegeorge.com  and take the free tour.

Joe Hurley

The more astonishing things that Google did is the fact that they completely dominate the surfing pattern of the entire world. Their intelligent strategy and business models is basicly the key to their success, and vividly projected the outcome of the internet culture. Google was considered late entrant in search engine business compare to Lycos, Altavista, Netscape, a DC area based AOL Time Warner and many, but yet they had define and secured a solid position in the industry.

Scott Anthony, the President of Innosight and a Discussion Leader at Harvard Business Publishing, has offered one of the best analyses of Nokia's business case for turning Symbian open.

Why Nokia Bought Symbian, Then Gave It Away - Scott Anthony

Essentially, the folks at Innosight reckon that consumers don't purchase cell phones for the operating system - they purchase for the looks and, increasingly, the capabilities.  With new SDKs for the iPhone and the buzz around other open development platforms for mobile devices, Nokia could see its handset business threatened should a "killer application" be developed for a different platform.  Now Nokia is opening up the largest mobile development platform in the world, seeking to attract the best developers to Symbian so that Nokia's handsets will be the most capable devices in the world.

I wonder if Nokia is also stepping down a path similar to IBM's transformation into a services organization.  Could Nokia become a consultant and deployer of services when the platform is open?  Might Nokia become the preferred enterprise partner for mobile applications, given its expertise in handsets and operating systems?

What Nokia lacks is an integrated service tier, like that of Google's mobile services, to make a concerted effort at becoming a leading mobile services organization.  Google, which is leading the charge on Android, has the potential to be the leader in mobile ad services for advertisers and publishers targeting Android devices as well as extend its reach of ad-supported services like GMail and Blogger to a world of mobile devices.

Google competes on the basis of choice every day, so it's not likely to require use of its services in an Android deployment, but it is particularly well situated to benefit from wider mobile access to its web and ad services.

A critical issue for Internet startups is how to turn the cool idea into revenue. Acknowledging that in the past this was less of a concerns, here is an entrepreneur who discusses this issue in an interesting way as they pertain to his venture ( blog post ).

The bottom line, whether you plan an early exit or not, the revenue model should be an integral part of the strategy!