NYTimes writes:

The U.S. has had the biggest economy in the world for more than a century, but most projections show that China will surpass us in about 15 years, as measured by purchasing power parity.

So what can New York learn from a city like Kaifeng?

One lesson is the importance of sustaining a technological edge and sound economic policies. Ancient China flourished partly because of pro-growth, pro-trade policies and technological innovations like curved iron plows, printing and paper money. But then China came to scorn trade and commerce, and per capita income stagnated for 600 years.

A second lesson is the danger of hubris, for China concluded it had nothing to learn from the rest of the world - and that was the beginning of the end.

I worry about the U.S. in both regards. Our economic management is so lax that we can't confront farm subsidies or long-term budget deficits. Our technology is strong, but American public schools are second-rate in math and science. And Americans' lack of interest in the world contrasts with the restlessness, drive and determination that are again pushing China to the forefront.

Jason Kottke writes:

Much like the shift from molecules to atoms to subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, etc.) to quarks to (potentially) tiny vibrating strings as the most fundamental unit of physical matter that we can find, the fundamental unit for content on the web has been getting smaller as well:

1. The site. You'd see references on sites or in emails like "check out this cool hotwired.com site" or "go to Bobaworld, scroll down, and click on the 'cool links' link". This quickly gave way to:

2. Individual pages. People learned that the web was all about the page. The X-Files Episode Guide page, your Geocities home page, the product page for that new Thinkpad with the fold-out keyboard.

3. But eventually content producers started gathering several chunks of content on the same page and came up with the post/permalink combination. The idea is that several bits of content might be on this page right now, but may be gone when you come back, so here's a permanent link to it so you can find it at some later time. Weblogs are the best example of this, but there are others...Google Maps gives you a way to permalink the particular map you're on for later reference.

4. And now it seems that there are several efforts underway to cut the fundamental unit down to the phrase or word. Online bookmark managers like del.icio.us and Furl and scores of bloggers doing remaindered links blogs link to things with just a few words to describe them. Sites supporting tagging (del.icio.us, Flickr) are creating vast collections of stuff for single words and short phrases. Wikipedia is working on making any word or phrase linkable to an array of information about that word. Linking words or phrases to a Google search result is always an option as well.

Silicon Valley Watcher has a report by Jonathan Boutelle:

The emerging theme from the summit was that AJAX is not rocket science. While building an application like Google Maps is huge technical challenge, adding a little bit of AJAX “spice” to an existing production website can take as little as a few weeks.

Derek Powazek of Technorati, Eric Costello of Flickr, and Dustan Orchard from Odeo showcased the next versions of their sites, which have several improvements that would have been impossible without AJAX techniques. One of the few statements that this (often contentious) group managed to rally around was the idea that "AJAX is only rocket science if you are building rockets."

Technical frameworks for making AJAX development are cropping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Of the many developments, the most compelling is clearly Ruby on Rails. Rails is a rapid web application API that already has remarkable momentum. David Heinemeier Hansson, the amiable Dutch mastermind behind the rails framework, gave a nice overview of how Ruby on Rails makes AJAX websites easy to develop. Other free technical frameworks like SAJAX (simple AJAX) are available, and new frameworks are cropping up every day, so it may take some time for the market to sort through these offerings an settle down on a manageable number of toolkits.

Brent Ashley has a nice architecture diagram of the rich web communication model.

The Economist writes about a meme first expounded by Chris Anderson in Wired:

When people invoke the long tail, what do they mean?

The short answer is a shift from mass markets to niche markets, as electronic commerce aggregates and makes profitable what were previously unprofitable transactions. Consider book sales, which obey a power-law distribution: there is a small number of very popular books, which sell millions of copies, and then a long tail of less popular books. A real-world shop can only stock so many titles on its shelves, so it generally holds those most likely to sell, at the head of the curve: even the largest bookstore carries only around 130,000 titles. But an online store, with no limits on its shelf space, can offer a far wider range and open up new markets further down the long tail. In the case of Amazon, for example, around a third of its sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles.

This has a number of intriguing implications. For one thing, opening up those previously uneconomic niche markets should increase overall demand: as people are better able to explore niches, they are more likely to find things they like, and may well consume more of them. This will then shift some demand, at least, away from hits. Indeed, the long tail reveals the hit-driven nature of the entertainment industry to be, in part, a vestige of scarcity. With limited space on store shelves, media providers are traditionally very discriminating about what they release, and use intensive marketing to generate a handful of hits. The shift towards electronic sales and distribution, however—music can already be purchased and downloaded instantly, and movies will be next—means that content providers can afford to be less discriminating. “The long tail says rather than trying to guess what the market wants, put it all out there and you'll find demand you hadn't anticipated,” says Mr Anderson.

Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture.

Howard Rheingold writes:

"E-mail was a great enabler of mobile Internet in Japan, and there is a fundamental mathematical reason for this," claimed Ville Saarikoski, a Finn who lived in Japan when i-mode was launched and former head of mobile R&D for Sonera, in a recent e-mail interview. E-mail networks, he noted, have the unique structure of "scale-free" or "small world" networks, while the potential connectivity between nodes of SMS networks are far more highly constrained -- it takes much longer, with many more hops, to travel across networks that do not have scale-free distribution. If he's right, Saarikoski's notion could be powerfully predictive as well as explanatory: future mobile Internet services that enable the formation of scale-free networks could be far more successful than services that don't allow people to grow networks of that form.

"Think about Nokia's slogan, 'Connecting People,'" Saarikoski responded when I asked him about which properties of scale-free networks are important in mobile social media: "SMS connects people very inefficiently. Those who design future services would do well to search for more efficient ways of connecting people. Mobile e-mail not only connects people more efficiently, but its integration with the Web is key. A Web site creates a superconnected node, which drives networks toward scale-free properties, but information about the Web site has to spread in order for that to happen. I think the role of people-to-people messaging, the online/mobile equivalent of word-of-mouth, is huge in this regard. Look at Skype -- no advertising budget, but it spreads like wildfire. Trust is important in connecting people with commerce online, and people trust their friends. Again, media like mobile e-mail connect people to their social networks, the source of trusted information, and to the Web, where transactions don't flow without trust. Perhaps the most important property of scale-free networks when you are talking about telecommunications is the property that enables them to evolve: innovations in scale-free networks can spread incredibly fast through the entire network. "

Let us begin by identifying the various needs of the SMEs in Emerging Markets (SMEEMs). We had classified the two primary drivers as business growth and automation – or to put it more succinctly, automation for business growth.

The fundamental question that SMEEMs need to ask themselves is: “How would we do our business differently if everyone had a computer on their desktop?” While this pre-supposes that IT is good for them, this is not an incorrect assumption. IT brings down transaction costs and eases the flow of information. If only a fraction of employees who need to process information have access to a computer, the flow will be more paper-driven or verbal, rather than electronic. Consider email for example. If only half the organisation has email access, then its use is severely limited. Starting with the basis that everyone who needs a computer can and should have access to one creates the foundation for building an efficient enterprise.

For business growth, SMEEMs need to ensure that they use the Internet well for their communications and marketing, to complement offline activities. While many SMEEMs have websites, they don’t necessarily have the latest information – because updates are hard. Using blog-like content management systems can simplify the website management process. An RSS feed can ensure that customers can be alerted whenever new products and services are launched. (Email newsletters were effective until recently – increasingly, the use of spam filters ensures that they may not reach their targeted audience.) While much of this is very easy to do for an individual writing a blog, this is still quite difficult to do for an enterprise – and this is of the first areas than service providers should target.

The second key need centres around the marketing, sales and support processes. These are activities which are critical to ensure that prospects are converted to customers efficiently, and customers are well-supported. This is where the likes of Salesforce.com have made a strong impact in the US. CRM and SFA functions can be handled by ASPs and companies are more likely to want these activated quickly because it helps them grow.

The third area relates to internal interactions and smoothening the flow of information internally. Email has its limitations and collaborative business processes can be done via the Web. From activities like group calendaring and scheduling to contacts management, from sharing information across teams to internal workflow-driven processes, ASPs can offer a “process portal” to allow enterprises to pick and choose the ones that they want to use. We can think of these as business services for employees.

Beyond these three, there are other processes which can be made available via ASPs. For example, SMEEMs can be offered an online e-business suite which extends the customer management processes to accounting, inventory management, and supply chain management. In addition, on the security front, ASPs can take care of ensuring that all emails received are free from viruses and spam. Taken together, these processes will help the SMEEMs automate their businesses faster.

Tomorrow: Technology Building Blocks