Jeff Jarvis writes in the context of Google Base:

Imagine if you could go to a page that lets you put in your resume or house ad or job ad and it spits out tagged XML you could put on the web anywhere to be found by anyone.

Or imagine putting tags on restaurant reviews you post on your blog so anyone could aggregate or search for, say, all the cuisine=mexican restaurants in location=chicago. Well, you don’t really have to imagine that. If you agreed on the tags, you could start doing that today via Del.icio.us and Technorati.

And imagine if you could go to Google or other services — e.g., Indeed and SimplyHired for jobs or Baristanet for three Jersey towns — and see the tags they use so you can swarm around those tags and find and be found. That’s the openness we need.

Michael Parekh writes:

There's no eBay like marketplace where content can find it's own value as stocks do in the stock markets.

Sure, there are auctions on used books, music and videos and that tells you something, but it's not a front and central price signaling marketplace. And there are always the consumer reviews and rankings at Amazon that give you some sense of what a piece of content might be worth.

And now of course, we have tags, be they from Del.icio.us and others, that allow folks to publicly display their favorite and not-so-favorite lists of content for all to see.

But there's no online site that gives you a sense of what a piece of content is worth from a consumer point of view..

But there will be.

They may incorporate deeper implementations of Web 2.0 technologies like tags and RSS streams and the like, but at some point a marketplace will develop.

That would be the "Dream" scenario from a consumer perspective to counter the "dreams" of the music and content industries that Joel cites.

After all, Content ultimately seeks Attention, and Attention ultimately prices Content.

WSJ writes:

n their unending drive to pack more circuits into a smaller space, semiconductor makers have reached a new milestone: cramming the key parts of a cellphone onto a single chip.

This squeeze play is making mobile phones cheaper and smaller. It suggests that the under-$40 market, now driving the handset industry's expansion in India and Africa, could prove profitable for cellphone makers as well as appealing to consumers. Cellphone makers see great promise in the developing world, with Nokia Corp. dubbing the opportunity as the "next billion" users.
...
Executives recently toured Asian cellphone manufacturers with working prototypes of phones that used the chip and just 58 other components packed onto a circuit board about one inch square. By contrast, one of Motorola's low-priced mobile phones, using the older four main chips, has 245 components.

InfoWorld lists out a number of smart, successful IT projects.

Fred Wilson writes:

Many of the people I know in the venture capital business think their customers are their investors, called LPs in the industry vernacular. I've always thought that was dead wrong.

The entrepreneur is the customer and the LP is the shareholder. That's the only way to think about the venture capital business that makes sense to me.
...
Entrepreneurs are really difficult customers to serve well. It takes a significant investment of time, energy, money, and intellect to satisfy them. But if you do it well, you will develop a reputation for great customer service that will keep the best ones lined up at your door.

I become aware of Peter Drucker quite late in life. For the most part of the first half of my entrepreneurial life, management came by walking around and doing the necessary firefighting to prevent things going out of control. When I started reading Drucker’s writings for the first time somewhere around 2000-1, I was fascinated by both their simplicity and depth. Since then, I’ve tried to read and imbibe the spirit of what Drucker has written. The “first principles” thinking that Drucker brings seems so obvious in hindsight. Just like it required an Isaac Newton to discover the laws of mechanics, it needed a Peter Drucker to do the same for management.)

In the wake of Drucker’s death recently, most business publications have discussed his life and writings in great detail. In this week’s Tech Talk, I have attempted to compile together what they’ve had to say along with excerpts of Drucker’s writings.

Steve Forbes wrote in a tribute in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Drucker's genius for extraordinarily farsighted insights came from a combination of intense curiosity, right principles and deep understanding of the perfections and imperfections of human nature. He never went stale intellectually, which is why business journalists, executives, entrepreneurs, leaders of nonprofit institutions, students and the occasionally wise politician eagerly sought to pick his brains right up to the time he died.

What helped make Mr. Drucker so insightful was a profound understanding of economics, an understanding that still eludes most economists today. Not for him was the notion of "macroeconomics," of seeing the economy as something of a machine that can achieve steady, stable growth. To him, traditional economic notions of "equilibrium" or Keynesian ideas of "aggregate demand" were nonsense. Innovation, constant change, and turmoil were the true constants of a progressing economy.

Drucker simply didn’t care about the conventional view on any management topic, since he had thought them all through and knew where he stood. Yet I was still surprised by the vehemence with which he disdained the modern vogue for exalting leadership, as distinct from paltry old management. It infuriated him, though he was too polite to say so unless you asked him about it, which I did. His reasoning was extremely simple: “The three greatest leaders of the 20th century were Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. If that’s leadership, I want no part of it.”

There were many things Drucker wanted no part of. Big universities, for instance. He scorned them all to remain at tiny Claremont College—payback, perhaps, for the scorn they’d heaped on him early in his career. Economists dismissed his work as cheap sociology. Sociologists had no use for business. And Drucker was dismissive of them all. “No economists were interested in organizations,” he explained in a 2001 interview with my colleague, Jerry Useem. The field “was based on the asinine assumption that organizations act like individuals. They don’t.” Here, Drucker had sensed a huge opportunity. Like any great entrepreneur—“somebody who creates something new,” as he once defined the term—he was raiding these older disciplines to create one that didn’t yet exist. Physics sprang from Newton, economics from Adam Smith. And Peter Drucker became the undisputed father of management—the discipline devoted to the study of organizations.