Business Week writes:

Second Life is one of the many so-called massively multiplayer online games that are booming in popularity these days. Because thousands of people can play at once, they're fundamentally different from traditional computer games in which one or two people play on one PC. In these games, typified by the current No. 1 seller, World of Warcraft, from Vivendi Universal's (V ) Blizzard Entertainment unit, players are actors such as warriors, miners, or hunters in an endless medieval-style quest for virtual gold and power.

All told, at least 10 million people pay $15 and up a month to play these games, and maybe 20 million more log in once in a while. Some players call World of Warcraft "the new golf," as young colleagues and business partners gather online to slay orcs instead of gathering on the green to hack away at little white balls. Says eBay Inc. founder and Chairman Pierre M. Omidyar, whose investing group, Omidyar Network, is a Linden Lab backer: "This generation that grew up on video games is blurring the lines between games and real life."

Brad Feld has a post from "a close friend of mine is spending a year traveling around with world with his wife and 11 year old daughter."

China is wild - definitely glad I came so I never have to come back.

It is so polluted in the air that I feel like I'm sucking on an exhaust pipe while in a middle of a sand storm. Beijing gets these sand storms off the gobi since all the forests have been cut down and everything is covered in a layer of dust that just won't go away - add in coal burning power plants, no emissions on cars and 15 million people and you simply can't breathe. So after 4 days in the capital we went to Xi'an (the ancient capital now 5.4 million people) and it’s just the same - you can't tell if it’s day or night - it's almost comical, but sad.

Prices are at both extremes - for western brand stuff in legitimate stores its 40% more than the states - everywhere else it’s cheaper (and there is no shame in selling whatever brand will make them money). I think communism works well for the Chinese - there are so many people if they had too much freedom I'm sure there would be greater civil unrest.
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Hey 1.3 billion people can do a lot of stuff - but you've got to take care of 1.3 billion people and that's not gonna be easy - I don't think China has it in the bag to dominate the global economy in 50 years - plus they might have a peasant revolt in the meantime...

Tomi Ahonen writes:

Growth of the PC based internet is slowing down. Growth of the mobile phone based internet is accelerating. Only 41% of all internet access is by people who only access by PC. Already 25% of all internet access is only by mobile phone. Soon more people will access by mobile than PC. How soon? By 2008.

What will this mean to the internet industry? The mobile phone can replicate all services that the traditional PC based internet can do. Yes, the screen is smaller, but that is no absolute obstacle. But everything else we had on the web, including its interactivity, is also available on the mobile phone.

Dare Obasanjo writes:

Right now, there is the primarily HTML-powered Web which whose primary clients are Web browsers and search engine bots. For better or worse, over time Web browsers have had to deal with the fact that Web servers and Web masters ignore several rules of the Web from using incorrect MIME types for files to having malformed/invalid documents. This has cemented hacks and bad practices as the status quo on the HTML web. It is unlikely this is going to change anytime soon, if ever.

Where things get interesting is that we are now using the Web for more than serving Web documents for Web browsers. The primary clients for these documents aren't Web browsers written by Microsoft and Mozilla and bots from a handful of search engines. For example, with RSS/Atom we have hundreds of clients with more to come as the technology becomes more mainstream. Also Web APIs becoming more popular, more and more Web sites are exposing services to the world on the Web using RESTTful approaches. In all of these examples, there is justification in being more rigorous in the way one uses HTTP than one would be when serving HTML documents for one's web site.

In conclusion, I completely agree with Robert Sayre's statement that there are really two kinds of HTTP. One is HTTP-For-Browsers, and one is HTTP-For-APIs.

Mumbai roads are improving slowly. But we still cannot seem to get road construction right – we think of city road construction as an annual event. (Of course, everyone except the people who use the roads benefit from the annual-ness of the process – politicians, bureaucrats and contractors have had a nexus around road construction for a long time.) The blame every year is on the severity of the rains which washes away much of the flimsy surface leaving a patchwork of roads and a liberal dose of potholes. A few years, the World Bank intervened and got many of the roads concretized. But for the most part, city roads across India leave a lot to be desired. I would have thought it should be easy to do it once and right, but perhaps it will still take us time to reach that level of integrity in the awarding of the contracts.

What surprised me was the quality of the road as soon as we left Mumbai. Right through to the outskirts of Surat, it is a delight. It is what I think of as a 100-kmph road: one could easily do 100+ kilometres per hour on the road for the most part. There are two lanes in each direction with a divider. There are no traffic lights. Busy junctions when passing small towns have been bypassed with flyovers or smaller side roads. The two lanes in each direction make overtaking easier and safer.

I think the Mumbai-Surat road is part of what in India is being called the Golden Quadrilateral project, an ambitious highway construction plan to connect five key cities. (Here is a map of the project.) That probably explains the proper maintenance, especially since that is part of the road which is the primary link between Mumbai and Delhi, India’s two most important cities.

Roads have been one of India’s biggest infrastructure bottlenecks since Independence. For some strange reason, we just forgot to construct a lot of new good roads. The present Congress government and the previous BJP government have now set about correcting this humungous error of judgment. We still have a long way to go, but at least there is now a recognition that India needs a good highway infrastructure. The quality of the roads has still plenty of room for improvement – even the recently built Mumbai-Pune expressway has an increasing number of problem patches.

The good news is that the roads in India are improving. I had that feeling during my previous trip to Rajasthan – and it was reinforced during this trip to Surat and back. I could actually read and think without being subjected to bumps along the route. There is a predictability in the travel from the outskirts of one city to the other. (The ‘last mile’ problem still remains – on my second trip, it took 3 hours to travel about 225 kms from Surat to the Mumbai suburbs, and then another 3 hours to cover the remaining 75 kms. That may have been an exception because that day the buses were on strike causing an unusually large number of cars and other vehicles to take to the roads.)

So, even as cars and roads improve, what’s happening to the stopover points en route? Once again, I was pleasantly surprised.

Tomorrow: Mobile Lifestyle