WSJ writes:

The Linux operating system, having made inroads into corporations' backroom server computers, is showing hints of inching into a much broader market: employees' personal computers.
...
Chief information officers have experienced the cost savings that Linux has brought to their server computers, which do narrow and repetitive tasks such as data storage and serving up Web sites. Now some CIOs are taking new interest in installing Linux on workers' PCs as well, for certain narrow applications.

Here (via WonderLand).

Games are very open ended. Also, movies are primarily visual. Games are primarily interactive. So when we take away the control from a player, we’re taking away the most important thing from them. It’s like going to the movies and showing a blank screen...

Different games have different levels of interactivity, in some sense... here’s chess... [..] we’re trying to generate the largest rulespace in a game. This is the opposite of science, where we try to find simple rules to describe all this data. There’s this topological difference.

It’s because of the POV. When you’re telling a story in a movie, it’s from a chosen POV, it’s all controlled, but games, games look like this [screen of wiggles and randoms]. You go up here, you lose, so you go back to the beginning. Over here, you lose, try here. Back to the beginning. So movies are far more compelling than interactive drama, because interactive drama is quite flat.

Josh Kopelman writes:

Here at First Round Capital, we see a lot of business plans for consumer-facing internet services. Most assume a significant portion of their revenue comes through advertising -- but almost all of them have a "premium/subscription" option. Typically that subscription revenue accounts for 20-40% of total revenue, and is based on a very low ($1-5/month) subscription fee. When asked to support these subscription revenues, entrepreneurs almost always say "well, it's very cheap ($2 a month) and we're only assuming 5% of our users take advantage of it)." On the surface, a reasonable position.

However, that is rarely how things play out. Most entrepreneurs fall into the trap of assuming that there is a consistent elasticity in price - that is, the lower the price of what you're selling, the higher the demand will be. So you end up with hockey stick looking revenue charts that go up and to the right, all supported by an "it only costs $2 month" business plan.

The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. I can't think of a single premium service that has achieved truly viral distribution.

The Economist writes about what Tim Berners-Lee thinks:

Although he is somewhat sceptical of the hype around Web 2.0, Sir Tim is excited by three other areas of the web's development: its spread to millions of new users via mobile devices, the growing interest in the technology's social and political impact and the “semantic” web, in which information is labelled so that it makes sense to machines as well as people. “If you look at the number of internet-capable mobile phones, PDAs and so on, they are rapidly outnumbering the things we think of as computers,” he says. “As the price of these devices falls, large parts of the developing world will get web access. When you have a large mass of new users, you will get many new applications, written by people with other needs.”

strategy+business writes: "The world’s urban infrastructure needs a $40 trillion makeover. Here’s how to reinvigorate our electricity, water, and transportation systems by integrating finance, governance, technology, and design."

Cairo, Los Angeles, Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Mumbai, Tokyo, Washington, Sao Paulo: Each major city has its own story of electricity, transportation, or water systems in crisis. Although the circumstances vary from one urban area to the next, they all have one thing in common: The critical infrastructure that is taken for granted by both their citizens and their government leaders is technologically outdated, woefully inadequate, increasingly fragile, or all of the above. In some cities, the quality of water, power, and transportation infrastructure is noticeably declining. In others, it was never very good to begin with. And few cities have enough of it to meet future needs.

An estimate developed by Booz Allen Hamilton suggests the magnitude of the problem. Over the next 25 years, modernizing and expanding the water, electricity, and transportation systems of the cities of the world will require approximately $40 trillion — a figure roughly equivalent to the 2006 market capitalization of all shares held in all stock markets in the world.

Here are some excerpts from the first chapter of “The Strategy Paradox” by Michael Raynor:

Most strategies are built on specific beliefs about the future.Unfortunately, the future is deeply unpredictable. Worse, the requirements of breakthrough success demand implementing strategy in ways that make it impossible to adapt should the future not turn out as expected. The result is the Strategy Paradox: strategies with the greatest possibility of success also have the greatest possibility of failure. Resolving this paradox requires a new way of thinking about strategy and uncertainty.
…
The strategy paradox, then, arises from the collision of commitment and uncertainty. The most successful strategies are those based on commitments made today that are best aligned with tomorrow’s circumstances. But no one knows what those circumstances will be, because the future is unpredictable. Should one have guessed wrong and committed to the wrong capabilities, it will be impossible to adapt—after all, a commitment that can be changed was not much of a commitment. As a result, success is very often a result of having made what turned out to be the right commitments (good luck), while failed strategies, which can be similar in many ways to successful ones, are based on what turned out to be the wrong commitments (bad luck). In other words, the strategy paradox is a consequence of the need to commit to a strategy despite the deep uncertainty surrounding which strategy to commit to. Call this strategic uncertainty.
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The tool for creating strategic flexibility, called Strategic Flexibility, has four phases:

Anticipate: build scenarios of the future
Formulate: create optimal strategies for each of those futures
Accumulate: determine what strategic options are required
Operate: manage the portfolio of options
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This book is not the first to observe that the future is unpredictable and that strategy making must take uncertainty into account. What is new is that here uncertainty is not an afterthought, not something one considers after commitments have been made. Instead, uncertainty is placed at the core of decision-makjng at the highest levels of the organization, and a broad range of strategic and organizational thinking has been marshaled to address the paradox created by uncertainty.