From Charlie's Diary:

This is Palm's play for the corporate network. Docs to Go and Versamail aren't the real office apps intended for this platform; they're just the local offline editing tools for when you're not plugged in. If I'm right, expect to see Palm announce a service not unlike Apple's .Mac, only with added business services and more storage. Dot Mac is aimed at home users who want email, webspace, and easy synchronisation; I'd expect Palm to be preparing to deploy CRM applications, relational databases, and possibly office tools like Thinkfree Online. It's possible that they're going to try to negotiate uncapped access to this service via some of the bigger cellcos' business accounts. If they go this route, they're also likely to offer toolkits and SDKs to help corporate customers plug their business software straight into Palm's service and push it out to their employees' Foleos. A clear sign of this thinking would be the appearance of VNC, Citrix, or other thin client software on the platform.

The Foleo is light, simple, cheap to replace, and doesn't store any critical data if it's stolen, unlike an employee laptop. It lets a company keep critical data under lock and key, but makes accessing it relatively straightforward using existing Web 2.0 tech. If Palm manage to fill in the dotted line at the web services level, they can offer big clients something that PC laptops don't — simplicity and security, combined with lower cost.

Marc Andressen writes:

The new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry.
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What Facebook is now doing is a lot more sophisticated than simply MySpace-style embedding: Facebook is providing a full suite of APIs -- including a network protocol, a database query language, and a text markup language -- that allow third party applications to integrate tightly with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information.

And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.

Finally, Facebook is promising economic freedom -- third-party applications can run ads and sell goods and services to their hearts' content.

[via Om Malik] Chris Michel writes:

It is all about outcomes — and not activities.
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Most people tend to confuse activity with outcomes — and it is a breathtakingly expensive mistake. In a world of infinite choices, choosing which activities will occupy your day is likely to be your single greatest driver of effectiveness. Beyond picking the right objectives to pursue, you need to focus on the results, not just the means to that end.

Steve Rubel writes: "We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law."

Om Malik writes about the changes the phone from Apple will usher in:

Break the Wireless Walled Gardens: iPhone is fully functional iPod, with full tracks of music. Do you need to download ring tones for $2.99 a pop, when you get a full song for a third of that price? Ditto for Wallpapers, and themes, and everything else that is being sold on the carrier deck.

Shift of control to the customers: If the embedded (Safari) browser if it performs the way as hyped by Jobs & Co., will give us the choice-control we have on the web. Search engines to web sites – nothing will be determined by the wireless carriers who have thus far done nothing but create barriers between what we want, and giving us what they want to sell.

Continuing with Atanu Dey's perspective of the speech that the Indian Prime Minister should have made to the CII last month:

Friends, the primary job of industries is to produce goods and services. The first necessary condition for a successful economy is that it produces sufficient amount of stuff. If industry cannot meet that goal, all other activities are futile. Distribution of insufficient production – however equitably – will not solve the problem that we face. Nor will merely generating employment because employment is a means, not a goal, of economic activity. Let’s not confuse means with ends. Given sufficient production, the problem of equitable distribution can be tackled if necessary by the government.

Which brings us to one important distinction between industry and government. Baldly stated, industries engage in productive activities whereas the government, at best, engages in activities that are sterile. A government takes part of the production in the form of taxes and redistributes it according to some objective function that is arrived at through a process of political bargaining among the electorate. This redistribution is often necessary but is not costless. Part of what it extracts with the purpose of redistribution, the government “consumes” in the process of redistribution. That is a “deadweight loss” which grows not just with the size of the amount redistributed but also with the size of the government mechanism doing the redistribution. One of our former prime ministers, Mr Rajiv Gandhi, had famously stated just only 15 paise out of every Re 1 gets redistributed; the deadweight loss is 85 percent in India. Therefore increasing the efficiency of distribution is paramount if taxes have to be reduced without actually reducing the transfer to those who need it.

Reducing the size of the government is important for increasing the efficiency of transfer, of course. But there is another more compelling reason: reduction of corruption. It is a simple matter to recognize that the larger a government is, larger the control it has, which in turn creates an incentive for people and firms to “capture” the government. It creates an unholy nexus between the government and industry, with the former being lobbied by the latter for licenses, permits, and quotas.

We both, the industry and the government, have a social contract. Yours is to produce efficiently without imposing social costs, and to make a profit. Market forces will ensure efficiency and the laws will ensure that externalities are compensated for. Our social contract is to make and enforce the laws fairly and efficiently, and to correct for any imperfections that exist in society.

Let’s take the matter of employment to distinguish between the two social contracts. You will compete in the marketplace to employ the best that you can. Who you hire and how much you pay is not our business. Today your survival in the global marketplace is determined by how well you run your business. The government will not dictate how you go about conducting your business. If your employment policy discriminates against people based on any criterion not relevant to the job, the discipline of the market will weed you out in short order.

The government’s job is to ensure that every citizen – irrespective of caste, religion, sex, or economic status – has an equal opportunity to be what he or she is capable of being. The government must enforce equality of opportunity but cannot, and must not attempt to, enforce equality of outcome. Discrimination is abhorrent and the government will not practice it nor force the industry to do so. To give equal opportunity, the government will support the education of the poor without discrimination. That is, the playing field will be level but who plays well and who doesn’t will depend on the individual.

Your job is to produce as much as you can and as efficiently as you can. Our job is to make the rules and ensure that everyone has a fair shot at playing in the game. To level the playing field, we have to do some appropriate redistribution of production. We must keep the amount we redistribute within reasonable limits so that we don’t cripple the industry. We have to become more efficient in effecting the transfer and this means we will reduce the size of the government.

Tomorrow: Of Economic Freedom and Bondage