Flat pricing schemes for mobile internet are enticing customers to dramatically increase use of bandwidth. Interestingly enough, that is the axiom on which most operators have buidlt their mobile internet business models. Will this be sustainable in the long run?

Sony, once the clear market leader in consumer electronics and entertainment, has strongly suffered because of paradigm shifts in the industries it is active in. Now it is making yet another attempt to re-establish its leadership, using online services and its coverage of a broad range of potentially interoperable devices. Will this be a sound value proposition for consumers?

Boeing is suffering more than two years delay in launching its new composite-material 787 airliner and order cancellations are coming in. The reasons are interesting. First, Boeing has not only severely forfeited the product development capability it has always shown (e.g. in the 777 program) by shifting its attention and top management culture from engineering to sales. Second, it has inappropriately increased the degree of outsourcing, given the type of innovation involved. Using composite materials instead of alluminum for the airframe clearly is a radical innovation. Given that airplanes have an integral architecture, Boeing should have just done the opposite and developed competencies internally.

Few people have heard of Zune, the audio-video entertainment brand that Microsoft built in order to challenge Apple's iPod. Microsoft is now stepping up the challenge. Will its standard, based on interoperability between devices (Zune player, PCs/smartphones and Xbox consoles), be able to increase its market share from it's current and paltry 2%? Seems like a desperate attempt, but Microsoft has done it already in the past

Ericsson is starting to supply infrastructure to (digital) TV broadcasters. An example of how radical innovation - in this case the shift to digital technology - leads to industrywide effects - in this case convergence between telecoms and broadcasting.

Large corporations such as Microsoft and Amazon are making huge investment in data centers for cloud computing all over the world. These are mostly sunk costs, which make it very likely that while capacity will overshoot, competition will drive prices down to marginal cost. A good prospect for the paradigm to become dominant... maybe less so for the companies involved (at least at first).

Interestingly, Canon is changing its usual stance of focusing on its own core competencies. With its takeover offer of Océ, it aims to be a key player in the photocopier and printer industry. Quite different from its former approach of focusing on the inner engine of such products, selling or licensing it to other firms, and attempting some limited forward integration in order to avoid double marginalization. It is likely that Canon is recognizing that future value lies in services, and not simply in manufacturing

In the past decades, most watchmakers have decided to source core parts from suppliers. This has led to the quasi-monopoly of the component manufacturer ETA, owned by the Swatch group. Now this strategy is backfiring, with ETA creating stricter conditions to its customers, the latter complaining about unfair business practices but fundamentally unable to find alternative strategies. As one executives states, "it's not ETA that has created a monopoly, but others, by not investing".

Product liability issues are always quite tricky for companies. Even though child buggies are not really high-tech products, and safety problems should not come out unexpected, even established companies often mismanage the process.

Since decades, diffusion of operating systems depends on the avilability of the complementary asset called "applications", and allowing independent developers to work on them can help a lot. Now Samsung is realizing they are late to the game and are going to open up their OS. However, they might still have a chance because they are competing on the still uncrowded low-end segment.

Even though Second Life is no longer in the headlines, virtual worlds and networks, with virtual currencies being used when paying for virtual goods are well alive and growing. It is evident that innovation is not only about products and services, but also experience

The Skype saga is getting closer to its end. The recent lawsuit with the founders' IP company is going to be settled, with Skype getting hold of the code... and the founders receiving shares of the company. Founders definitely made a very clever set of moves when setting up their company.

E-mail is the predominant paradigm for electronic communication and cooperation, despite its obvious shortcomings. The article discusses a few alternatives that are currently emerging, but the picture of what will the future paradigm be still is very confusing

Short article commenting on the role of markets in allowing experimentation, chaos and ultimately innovation... sometimes that planning and government intervention cannot properly achieve. Nice reading.

The battle for smartphone OSs is no longer between Symbian and Windows. RIM and have become strong contenders, but now Google-sponsored Android seems to have a very high growth rate. What are its key points? Technical superiority, as is being boasted in ads? Or will it be better integration with the plethora of online services being developed by Google?

Toyota is maintaining its ambitious targets on the diffusion of hybrid cars. Some competitors are pushing the full-electric concept, guess why?

Windows 7 will enable touch-screen control of PCs, and PC makers are introducing devices with this feature. This is an interesting topic since tablet PCs, precursors to this technology, were mostly a flop a few years ago. What will happen this time? In case acceptance will be higher, will it be because of better performance of hardware and software? Or will it be because consumers are now accustomed to using touch-screens on smartphones?

An article on the way with which electronic publishing is challenging traditional paper-based books. It is interesting to notice how the outcome will depend on the way with which the market will values the ratio between fixed and variable costs of each medium - besides obvious differences in functionality.

The market is progressively embracing the cloud computing paradigm, since it perceives pros to be greater than its cons. However, we should remember that technological superiority of a paradigm on its competitors is not an absolute. As this article suggests, cloud computing makes users particularly vulnerable to data loss.

Carmakers traditionally considered on-board devices as closed, proprietary systems to be sold as options at very high margins. The wind is changing, and a new paradigm for infotainment is emerging: the car as a peripheral to personal computing devices.