Jeff Jarvis writes:

I know that’s counterintuitive and counter everything we’ve assumed about mass media. But today what matters is reaching the right people by the right means. That has always been the case. Only now, thanks to connected, collaborative media, it’s finally possible.

I’ll pull together a lot of links around this topic below. But most of them are still trying to measure mass: the new pageview, the
new audience count, the new click. I say the change we’re facing is much bigger than just the obsolescence of the pageview, much more fundamental: Size doesn’t matter. Relevance, credibility, and attraction do.

Instead of measuring quantity, we have to measure quality. And only when we do that will the true value of these new media be unlocked for everyone.

C. Enrique Ortiz writes:

I see 2007 as having the right ingredients for the birth of the next generation of mobility. Below are some of these ingredients:

* Advanced feature-and-media-rich handsets and APIs, including the next generation of Java on handsets: MIDP3 and MSA
* Fast and robust wireless networks everywhere
* Personal or near field networks
* Services, services: Services on the web, location-based services, open methods for service publish and consumption, collaboration
* Open tools, platforms, protocols and APIs, services, Internet, Web and Mobile Web, including W3C standards for Widgets and W3C WICD Mobile
* Messaging, and next generation messaging
* The mobility community continues to grow: from developers to investors
* People are getting it! User participation, user-generated content, collaboration, mass messaging/texting, high penetration of mobile handsets, the mobile lifestyle is happening!
* Investors are getting it, even outside Silicon Valley

Dion Hinchcliffe does his picks. "The overall trend: We have begun moving all our software, data, and even our social activities onto the Web en masse and the demand for high-quality online sites and applications that support this shift in primary focus from the PC to the Internet is there in vast numbers (there are now 1 billion users on the Web today). The net result is that 2006 brought us some of the best online applications ever created."

Fred Wilson writes:

A ton of content that used to be watched in the family room is going to be watched on other devices.

What are those devices? Desktop and laptop PCs, xBox and other game devices, PSP and other portables (maybe even smartphones). It's exploding TV time and 2007 is going to be a breakout year.
...
When video content owners really turn on their feeds, who knows what is going to happen. I already have a number of video feeds coming into my iTunes. But I keep it limited because video feeds are a great way to fill up your hard drive really fast. But the storage issues are going to get solved soon enough. And I would bet that video distribution ten years from now is largely built on a feed based architecture.

Guy Kawasaki has an article by Bill Reichert:

The purpose of your pitch is to sell, not to teach. Your job is to excite, not to educate.

Pitching is about understanding what your customer (the investor) is most interested in, and developing a dialog that enables you to connect with the head, the heart, and the gut of the investor. If you want advice about pitching, you can ask a venture capitalist, but you probably won’t get a very good answer. Most VCs are analytic types, and so they will give you a laundry list of topics you should cover. They won’t tell you what really “floats their boat,” mainly because they can’t articulate it in useful terms. “I know it when I see it,” is about the best answer you’ll get.

For India, it is becoming more and more apparent that the single biggest challenge is ensuring good education for tens of millions of people. Atanu Dey outlined his views on what is needed to transform education in India:

[What] is the big idea?
Provide an end-to-end managed service to educational institutions which will make education more effective, efficient, and relevant.
The service will be to provide all educational content (rich, multi-media, massively hyperlinked across domains) and tools (learning, teaching, testing, evaluation, teacher training, administration, reporting), and the technology platform to host the content locally and to access it.

Why would educational institutions use the service?
The service will use technology intensively. Like all appropriately used technology, it will reduce the costs for existing and new educational institutions.
Information and communications technology (ICT) characteristically demonstrates economies of scale. In other words, ICT solutions have high fixed costs and low marginal costs. That is, if the market for the ICT based solution is large, the average cost (and hence the price to the consumer) is very low. Think of the “Intel inside” processor in your PC or laptop.
It will be costly to develop the ICT-based solution which will be at the core of educational institutions but given that there are hundreds of thousands of schools in India, the average costs can be brought down low enough to make quality education a reality for tens of millions of Indians.

Isn’t everyone and his brother talking about ICT and education? In what way is your idea different?
In a number of ways. Firstly, it is not PC-based. It does not call for hundreds of PCs in schools, nor laptops for kids. It provides the technology platform on the school premises and everyone accesses the content on site.
Therefore, secondly, it does not involve accessing content remotely across a broadband connection to a server located out there in the cloud. This is not a distance-education plan.
Thirdly, it does not create content; it aggregates existing content and tools. Indeed all components of the system are taken off the shelf and assembled into a general purpose— and therefore flexible— solution which can be used across a broad spectrum of educational institutions.