Forbes writes:

Akamai (from the Hawaiian word for "clever") seemed destined to become another casualty of the dot-com calamity. But six years later it has made an audacious comeback.

It powers the video wave now sweeping over the World Wide Web. Major League Baseball games, sitcoms from NBC, movie downloads from Starz and more zip across the Internet via 20,000 superfast servers that Akamai has deployed in 71 countries. The company's video offerings are multiplying: Its servers "broadcast" live games for the National Hockey League in high definition.

Most of the big online sites on the planet use Akamai to deliver all sorts of digital goods faster than the regular Net can handle.

The Economist writes: "Social networking has proved to be of greatest value to companies in recruitment. Unlike a simple jobs board, social networks enable members to pass suitable vacancies on to people they know, and to refer potential candidates back to the recruiter. So employers reach not only active jobseekers but also a much larger pool of passive candidates through referrals. LinkedIn has over 350 corporate customers which pay up to $250,000 each to advertise jobs to its expanding network. Having lots of people in a network increases its value in a “super-linear� fashion, says Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's founder. He says corporate use of his service is now spreading beyond recruiters: hedge funds use it to identify and contact experts, for example."

Knowledge@Wharton talked to Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: "Computation is improving dramatically; we now have multi-core processors and soon we're going to have many-core processors. Storage improvements continue unabated. Broadband is becoming increasingly pervasive -- I want to say that respectfully to people in rural areas and others who don't necessarily enjoy the benefits of high bandwidth. But the fact that so many people have high bandwidth [lets] us figure out how to balance what part of an application should be in a data center -- somewhere "in the cloud" -- and what piece of that solution should be on a desktop or on a mobile device. The right balance varies based on the application...But that balance is far different moving forward than it has been in the past. When you have a very thin straw to a service, you tend to balance things differently than when it's a higher bandwidth pipe."

AllwaysOn writes:

John Doerr asserted the FCC will approve at least one new broadband network in the next year, wresting broadband power from the current duopoly of cable and telephone companies. His prediction was the second of the night at the Churchill Club's ninth annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate.

Doerr was not shy about the impact of this imminent approval: “It could be the single most important thing we could do for economic development in the next ten years: get more broadband freely available.” And if it's ubiquitous and nearly free, he added, mobile devices "are really going to displace PCs."

MEX discusses some of the new initiatives coming out and writes:

The nascent mobile search engine sector is quickly discovering some important trends in the way user’s interact with content in the mobile environment. When they search, they want to be taken to things which match their request rather than a long, Google-style list describing a series of pages which may or may not contain what they’re looking for. If someone is searching for a soccer star, they respond much better to a results page with photos, a table of their team’s latest scores and video clips of their most recent goals than a series of text links to associated web pages.

These behaviour patterns will have an effect on mobile UI requirements. The traditional mentality of application silos, itself a legacy of PC-style computing, is inappropriate for users who consume a lot of content in the mobile environment. Why should a user who wants to send a photo of their favourite celebrity need to open a web browser, access a search engine, save the image into a gallery application and open their messaging client to achieve their objective. This would be tedious enough with a mouse and desktop screen, let alone the limited form factor of a mobile device.

Dear Abhishek,

Happy Birthday! This is my third letter to you (2005 – 2006). As you turn two on April 19, it is once again time to reflect on the year that was and what’s to come. [Here are some recent photos of Abhishek.]

This has been a year when you have created some wonderful memories. There are times when I am away from you when I just think about those delightful moments that you created for me (and your mom) to savour. Of course, you didn’t know that – you were just being what you always are – a sweet, little baby!

I remember the first time I took you out for an extended period of time without your mother. It was October 2, Gandhi Jayanti. Your mother had caught chikungunya, one of those rare tropical diseases transmitted by a mosquito bite. When I look back at it, perhaps, that was one of the better things to have happened for our relationship. Since Bhavana could not carry you (her joints ached and she had very little strength in her arms and legs), the responsibility of taking you out fell on me. Bhavana needed rest, so I decided to take you out. And from that day onwards, we have never really looked back.

That day, we went on a bus ride. You’ve always liked buses. Sitting at the window of our house every morning, you want to see “one more bus.” So, I decided that sitting inside one of them will be a good experience for you. We took the first bus which came and went for a long ride. Of course, you fell asleep rather quickly sitting on my lap with the warm October wind blowing in your face. When we reached Churchgate, I woke you up and we went for a little walk around – ending up at Oxford Bookstore. And then, after some time walking around the store, we took a cab and came back home. You had been away from your mom for four hours – and didn’t worry about it. We had something going!

After that day, I started taking you out a lot more. Most Sunday mornings, we would go out somewhere or the other – just the two of us. At times, it was random bus rides to nowhere in particular. At other times, it was to the nearby bookstore (Crossword at Kemp’s Corner) or the grocery store (Akbarally’s). All you wanted was to go out (or “bar”, as you called it in Hindi.) There was the time we went to Infiniti Mall in the suburbs – that day you were without your mom for a half-day.

It all culminated with you coming with me for the office picnic. That was in the last week of December. You stayed – happily – without your mother for an entire day. You didn’t eat much – I just don’t have the perseverance and patience that your mom has! But you managed quite well with the junk food I gave you. It was a great experience. You grow up a little that day. And perhaps, so did I – as a father.

Tomorrow: A Day in Your Life