The Pondering Primate links to an article from ARNnet:

The RFID market has passed through the hype stage and is now coming of age in the channel, according to a Victorian pioneer in the technology.

"The real opportunity in the channel is around asset management because it's a closed system," Unique Micro Design's Geoffrey Ramadan said. "Supply chain, meanwhile, has a more collaborative nature and you really need a mandate to push it through the supply chain.

"The mobile phone is converging into a general access terminal and there are a number of new compact devices coming out with bar-coding, GPRS, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that are going to be very versatile."

Ramadan predicted 2007 would be the year of mobility and ubiquitous computing and that RFID would take on a significant role.

[via Smart Mobs] By Ville Saarakoski. "This research focuses on the mobile internet. Japan was successful with its mobile
internet launch already in 1999. The West has struggled and has been unable to follow Japan’s success. This research asks why and builds a new understanding to the mobile internet."

Fred Wilson writes:

It may take only two or three great developers to build and launch a web service. But it still takes a bunch more to maintain it, develop it from there, deal with scalability, deal with feature enhancements, take the service in new directions, respond to competitive threats, etc, etc.

Two years into the creation of a web services company, you'll certainly have more than ten engineers on your team and you could be looking at closer to twenty. That costs money.

Another unavoidable fact is that customers are expensive. They require service. And you can't provide customer service forever with a blog that most of your customers don't even know exists. You have to provide email support for sure. And more and more web services company (certainly the ones who want to service mainstream customers) are moving to some form of phone support.

Here. Vendor Relationship Management is the reciprocal of Customer Relationship Management.

HipMojo writes:

Think about it: Google can essentially take:

- Gmail
- Docs and Spreadsheets
- Google Payment (what’s the name again?)
- Google Talk (replace all of the other instant messaging services you use as a sales person)
- Google Maps (for directions to clients’ offices, or meeting spots)
- Google Calendar (obvious, to track dates, calls, meetings, etc.)
- Picasa (so you can see what people look like or people can put a face to their favorite salesperson’s voice and name)
- Video player (for demos, presentations etc.)
- Analytics (prospecting tool par excellence, I mean most sales people rely on Alexa, not Nielsen Net Ratings or comScore)
- Blogger (so your clients can read about you, your products and services)
- Jotspot (so employees can share intelligence, or clients and salespeople can share information)
- Alerts (a prospective client announces something, you can hit them up ASAP)
- Finance (so you can check out the size of the company you are hitting up)
...
Oh… That’s just half of it: Google should then integrate Ad Sense to create an embedded lead generator. That would be insane. That, my friend, would be the Salesforce.com killer.

George Gilder wrote a brilliant essay in Wired about the importance of the data centre. These “information factories” are the real power behind today's Internet.

Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes of Gmails, MySpace pages, and dancing-doggy videos – a relentless march of daily deltas, each larger than the whole Web of a decade ago. To make sense of it all, Page and Brin – with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Barry "QVC" Diller's Ask.com hot on their heels – are frantically taking the computer-on-a-chip and multiplying it, in massively parallel arrays, into a computer-on-a-planet.

The data centers these companies are building began as exercises in making the planet's ever-growing data pile searchable. Now, turbocharged with billions in Madison Avenue mad money for targeted advertisements, they're morphing into general-purpose computing platforms, vastly more powerful than any built before.

All those PCs are still there, but they have less and less to do, as Google and the others take on more and more of the duties once delegated to the CPU. Optical networks, which move data over vast distances without degradation, allow computing to migrate to wherever power is cheapest. Thus, the new computing architecture scales across Earth's surface. Ironically, this emerging architecture is interlinked by the very technology that was supposed to be Big Computing's downfall: the Internet.

In the PC era, the winners were companies that dominated the microcosm of the silicon chip. The new age of petacomputing will be ruled by the masters of the remote data center – those who optimally manage processing power, electricity, bandwidth, storage, and location. They will leverage the Net to provide not only search, but also the panoply of applications formerly housed on the desktop. For the moment, at least, the dawning era favors scale in hardware rather than software applications, and centralized operations management rather than operating systems at the network's edge.
...
Wasting what is abundant to conserve what is scarce, the G-men have become the supreme entrepreneurs of the new millennium. However, past performance does not guarantee future returns. As large as the current Google database is, even bigger shocks are coming. An avalanche of digital video measured in exabytes (10 to the 18th power, or 1,000 petabytes) is hurtling down from the mountainsides of panicked Big Media and bubbling up from the YouTubian depths. The massively parallel, prodigally wasteful petascale computer has its work cut out for it.