[via Russell Beattie] Christian Lindholm of Yahoo discusses the following trends:

1. Mobile e-mail will be the key theme in mobility for 2006
2. The cameraphone is being perfected during 2006
3. I think mobile search will be a big topic in 2006
4. Mobile Music is going to be a huge topic in 2006
5. Waiting for killer transformers
6. Mobile VOIP is still hype in 2006

Bob Wyman writes:

Mike Masnick of Techdirt asked in a comment on Rob Huf's blog at BusinessWeek: "What's the benefit [of Edgio] over Craigslist or eBay?" Keith Teare of Edgio has already responded, but I think an essential and profoundly important point is being missed... The key difference between these three services can be found in how they get their data. Edgio is an "open" service that aggregates data which is openly published anywhere on the web while CraigsList and eBay are closed, wall-garden sites that only provide service to data that has been published within the confines and control of their "walled-gardens."

Edgio is one of the first commercial services to leverage the extraordinary power of Structured Blogging and the "semantic web" by aggregating structured content published on any of the millions of blogs in the open web.

John Jordan writes:

ThingMagic builds tag-agnostic RFID readers that are more like routers than radios. As the company's VP for development puts it, "The new RFID readers are designed to provide the functionality of a gateway for large networks. RF interfaces to the tags reside on one side of a reader, with a database server and a TCP/IP network interface on the other side, fully equipped to be part of a networked-distributed data aggregation and analysis system." Network-friendly functionality, including load-balancing, quality of service, and security, is now provided by the readers. These can handle active and passive tags, including those in any geography and written to any standard. The company, an MIT spinout, has raised $21 million, including $6 million from Cisco and Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte in February. It has been profitable for all of its five-plus years.

While RFID adoption has widely been reported to be slower than expected, a new generation of tags and readers, including ThingMagic's, is expected to accelerate the pace of adoption: Bear Stearns reported this week that WalMart had purchased 15,000 fixed readers from ThingMagic's competitors Alien and Impinj while Albertson's bought 5,000 fixed readers from Symbol.

From the introduction to Yochai Benkler's book:

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment.
In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today.

DOS and Windows, according to Robert Cringely.

I see an Apple business strategy that combines OS X and Vista. Nearly all of Apple's own applications, like iLife and iWork, will still be OS X-only, as will be thousands of native OS X apps, so there will be many opportunities to lure Vista users into the light.

Given Microsoft's difficulties with data security and its long history of troubled OS introductions, there is the very real possibility that the Apple version of Vista will be by far the most stable. For awhile it might be the ONLY stable version. So Apple could, in a way, be Microsoft's savior.

But even saving Microsoft from itself has to undermine Redmond, because it brings back the old Windows software model. As one grizzled veteran of the PC wars recalled:
...
"One of the good things about the earlier versions of Windows was DOS. While DOS was most definitely a limited operating system, that was part of its strength. Since there wasn't much there, there wasn't much to break and it was easy to fix. As the world moved to Windows, DOS was still there. It was just hidden. When Windows was messed up, you could always drop into DOS and fix Windows. Over time Microsoft created the registry and a new file system, neither of which could be fixed from DOS. DOS was the 'trusted' operating system that we could fall back on to fix problems."

This week on Wednesday, Abhishek turns one. Continuing what I began last year, here is my next letter to him.

Dear Abhishek,

Happy Birthday! It is hard to imagine you are one. (There are also times when it is hard to imagine that you are only one!) You’ll be much older by the time you can read these letters, but I thought I’d still continue the series so you have a little written record of your life and the world around.

I still remember clearly April 19, 2005. Bhavana (your mom) had had a difficult night. We went to the hospital around 8:30 am after a visit to the temple. I was quite sure that you still had time to be born and it was all just a false alarm – there was still a week or so before you were due. Your mother wasn’t so sure. (While we are at it, always remember this: your mother is always right. It took me many long years after our marriage to figure this out. It would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had realised this early enough!)

So, we were at Breach Candy hospital waiting for the doctor (the gynaecologist) to come. All seemed okay. Or so it seemed. When the doctor came, she took a look at your heartbeat and decided that the time had come. The doctors took Bhavana immediately to the operation theatre and half-an-hour later or so came the news that you had arrived into this world.

I had spent that waiting time writing my diary in the hospital. It was a bit sudden. While I had tried to prepare myself for a long time for your birth, I hadn’t expected that it would happen so fast. Many thoughts crossed my mind. The trials and tribulations that we had gone through during the IVF treatment was mixed with the anticipated joy of seeing our own child. At that time, we didn’t know whether we were going to have a boy or girl. But whatever it would be, I knew one thing – you’d be our only child.

And so when the nurse came and announced, “It’s a boy”, I knew your name. You mother had thought about it a long time ago. Abhishek. (Just so you know, we didn’t have a name thought up in case you’d have been a girl.) I saw you a few minutes after you were born. You looked so skinny and red! I touched you. You were real! I was a father.

Tomorrow: Memories