News.com writes about a recent event:

there was a general consensus that--as mobile devices become more sophisticated--the 3D Web would become much more the province of such devices and far less of the kinds of desktop or laptop computers we know today.

During one break in the schedule Saturday, two members of the team producing Croquet, an open-source software platform designed for creating collaborative, multiple-user online applications, showed off their software. And as word spread about the demo, nearly everyone in attendance suddenly scrambled to watch.

Quickly, about 30 people gathered in a tight semi-circle around the two Croquet team members as they showed off the software's ability to let people move in and out of rich virtual spaces easily and with little of the lag and complicated user-interface of virtual worlds like "Second Life."

Technology Review writes:

Researchers at Microsoft are working on technology that they hope will someday enable people to browse online maps for up-to-the-minute information about local gas prices, traffic flows, restaurant wait times, and more. Eventually, says Suman Nath, a Microsoft researcher who works on the project, which is called SenseWeb, they would like to incorporate the technology into Windows Live Local (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth), the company's online mapping platform.

By tracking real-life conditions, which are supplied directly by people or automated sensor equipment, and correlating that data with a searchable map, people could have a better idea of the activities going on in their local areas, says Nath, and make more informed decisions about, for instance, what driving route to take.

The Register writes about an alliance between Qualcomm and Microsoft for mobile multimedia:

Could Wintel morph, in the wireless world, into QualSoft?

Certainly, even a surface reading of the new agreements indicates that this is an important coupling, and that is without taking into account the likely extensions of this initial collaboration that will take place over the coming months and years.

Qualcomm will "share information" (and patents) about its CDMA and W-CDMA chipsets with Microsoft in order to support the rapid development of a Windows Mobile smartphone bases on these designs, with the first chipsets shipping in the second half of the year. The work will be centered on the Qualcomm Convergence Platform MSM 7xxx architecture.

This gives Microsoft a new chip partner for the Windows Mobile operating system and for its own smartphone architecture, which currently owes almost all its limited success to ODMS – notably Taiwan's HTC – making PDA/cellphone hybrids based on Intel silicon (Texas Instruments does support Windows Mobile but this combination has not been actively promoted).

The Qualcomm alliance means Microsoft could target the CDMA sector, and also produce a 3G Windows smartphone for WCDMA. Also likely to be attractive for Windows Mobile, whose stronghold is the traditional territory of the enterprise PDA, is Qualcomm’s advanced work on integrated chipsets supporting 3G and Wi-Fi.

Peter Cochrane writes:

After degrading the broadband definition to much less than 2Mbps, and endlessly wondering why people would want more, and what would they do with it, governments, regulators, telcos, cable cos and ISPs are starting to realise the Japanese and Koreans got it right. A dedicated 100Mbps service is a minimal specification and 1,000Mbps looks like a more realistic target for a vibrant 21st century economy.
...
Beyond the creation of new industries and the transformation of the old, internet communication is about the only technology that allows us to offset travel and the associated burning of a lot of oil. But in this regard, we need big screens, hi-fi sound, telepresence technologies and more to make it work. And this we have, except we don't have the bandwidth necessary to get the level of realism of connection and communication to make it really work.

WSJ writes:

Having access to more information won't give traders an edge on the competition if every other trader has the same info at their fingertips. To that end, more and more people will create their own unique "mashups," drawing from different databases -- from Yahoo Finance to Technorati -- to hopefully reveal more than any would alone. "You can imagine somebody coming up with a special brew -- their own mix -- and if it cross-correlates perfectly, they'll have a view of information other people won't have," says Roger Kay, a former day trader who is now president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. "It's a perfection of information, an arms race in information."

I recently came across a book by Bo Peadody, another dotcom entrepreneur, entitled “Lucky or Smart?” Here is an excerpt (via Fast Company):

Luck is a part of life, and everyone, at one point or another, gets lucky. Luck is also a big part of business life and perhaps the biggest part of entrepreneurial life. At the very least, entrepreneurs must believe in luck. Ideally, they can recognize it when they see it. And over time, the best entrepreneurs can actually learn to create luck.

Luck in business is different from regular old luck, like when you find $20 on the sidewalk. First of all, being lucky in business has an intoxicating underbelly called believing you're smart. No one actually believes that he should take credit for finding $20 on the sidewalk. But when people get lucky in business, they are often convinced that it is not luck at all that brought them good fortune. They believe instead that their business venture succeeded thanks to their own blinding brilliance.

The big challenge is that everyone -- the press, your shareholders, your colleagues, your significant other, and your parents -- will work hard to convince you otherwise. They will tell you, over and over again, that you are in fact a genius and should take complete credit for all the great things happening to your company. Why? Because to them, you are one of the following:
1. A source of professional gain
2. A source of financial gain
3. A boss
4. A lover
5. Their pride and joy

None of these relationships provide incentive for any of these people to tell you the cold hard truth about your entrepreneurial success: You may have gotten just plain lucky.

The second difference between business luck and everyday luck is that luck in business can be created, whereas everyday luck cannot. You can't will yourself to find $20 on the sidewalk. But you can create a company that gets lucky more often than the average company. Indeed, there is a pseudo-scientific formula for creating business luck. The key element is this: Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies.

Somewhere, there is a connection between what Bo Peabody and Nassim Taleb write. In fact, as I read Nassim Taleb’s book, I could not but help think that a lot of what he says is so applicable not just to the world of investing but also in entrepreneurship.

Tomorrow: My Life and Views