WSJ writes about the Asian Wall Street Journal's Young Inventors Awards, which "aim to recognize and reward the ingenious thinking, effort and experimentation that lead to the discovery and creation of new ideas."

The Gold Award goes to Wang Qijie of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for creating all-fiber optical interleavers and deleavers -- a component of optical networks.

The Silver Award goes to Randall Law of the National University of Singapore for inventing an ultrafast laser nanopatterning device.

The Bronze Award goes to Liang Xiaojun, Sun Yi and Zhang Xuming, also of Nanyang Technological University, for developing a chip-based cancer-diagnostic kit.

Poynter Online writes about the threats newspapers face from the leading online media companies:

[Google and Yahoo] have boatloads of capital to invest in new ventures and acquisitions. They have strong existing news aggregation products, increasingly able to become the personalized "Daily Me," so long a staple of thinking about the-newspaper-of-the-future. Their principal revenue base is advertising, the lifeblood of newspapers' income.

Chew on this. As the year turns, the two hot technology companies have a market capitalization (shares of stock multiplied by share price) of roughly $100 billion, about $50 billion each. By contrast, the publicly traded newspaper companies, about 65 percent of the industry, are valued at about $80 billion.

[via Abhay] Legg Mason Capital Management has transcripts of their 2004 conference. Speakers included: Alph Bingham, Michael Mauboussin, James Suroweicki, Duncan Watts and W. Brian Arthur.

Forbes (Rich Karlgaard) idenitifies three trends: "V-blogs, cheap technology ably performing business chores and a new golden era for startups--rich rewards await the entrepreneurs who knit these trends together."

Honky: The Core should reside in your pocket and speak to a variety of Shell types wirelessly…The Core would carry the bare essentials for mobility allowing the user to access key data without necessarily having network access. The Core would simultaneously function as a user’s Access Card for the higher ASP functions…A user would typically walk upto a wall mounted touch screen terminal and have their familiar work environment immediately appear - the Core would tell the Shell who you are and what state your user profile is in.

Drambeg: Think of public transportation… run by the likes of Verizon, your cable company etc. etc. The reason for the success of the PC was/is that it’s like a car: you are in control of where and when you “go” and how long it takes to get there. Personally I hate public transportation and I’m absolutely certain I would hate the unpredictability of an ASP doling out compute “bandwidth", according to its rules & regs.

Raph: people need to develop web based interface and friendly ftp servers, webdav based client php interfaces simplicity + open source now. people need to learn about their responsibility in the online world and what they can do to prevent the web to become shattered (microsoft dream). I’m thinking about user-friendly jabber client php photo album mozilla calendar project (some please come up with and open source address book application)…Soon our cell phone will have enough processing power to host an ftp server 24/7 isn’t that privacy? and what about personal home servers what if for 300$ you can have you own internet gateway at home, your own .com your own voip gateway everything user-friendly with a php interface things like that are already on the market.

RicktheBrick: I believe that some company will give away the hardware so people will sign up for their service just like cell phones today. The people who do will not have to worry about the hardware as it will be like cable box today if it breaks it will be replaced for free. They will have access to billions of dollars of software and video for a monthly fee. The computer will have zero maintenance and zero worry so it will attract a huge amount of people.

ivan256: The fact of the matter is that companies will never trust their business critical processes to an application service provider. That's why the major ASPs failed in the '90s even while corporations *did* have the bandwidth to use their services. This means that it's never going to take of in the consumer market because the business market is where the money is. Consumer software is the drippings of the business computing market with some eye candy added. If the base technology can't catch on in the corporate world, it will never end up on the home desktop.

metamatic: People don't want to pay subscription fees for software. If they did, we'd see a ton of software being sold month-by-month, with remote activation via Internet. There's no technical block to doing so, and there hasn't been in over a decade. The problem is that whenever someone tries it, nobody outside of the business world is interested. People don't want to be at the mercy of the cable company or the phone company. We're talking about the two companies the average person probably hates most, and now you're offering them a way to make their entire computer system totally dependent on the whims of the corporate behemoths they hate? People don't want ever-increasing prices. Look at how the cable company jacks up subscription rates several times a year. Who wants that for all the software they run?

Monday: Comments (continued)