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IT, said Carr, is the next great technology that is going through a similar transformation.  Many IT capabilities, now handled in a distributed way, will be centralized in highly industrialized, efficient, scalable data centers - Clouds - which should free companies to invest in innovation where it really matters to their business.  Nick acknowledged that IT clouds are quite different in nature from electricity - more complex and diverse in the services they offer.  So it is too early to tell how IT clouds will evolve.

At the conference, there was quite a bit of discussion about the relationship of cloud computing to computing-on-demand offerings, such as Amazon Web Services, and software-as-a-service application platforms, such as salesforce.com.  Some have said that this spells the death of software.

I prefer to think of what is happening as the long-needed evolution of application software to something that is far more usable by humans.  When virtualizing applications to be used by people who care nothing about computers or technology - as is mostly the case with Clouds - the key thing we want to virtualize or hide from the user is complexity.

In the 2006 survey only 38 per cent of teens used their handset to listen to music; now 71 per cent of teenagers are using their mobiles as a portable mp3 player. 80 percent of teens in Singapore, Italy and Austria listened to music in this way, though teens in Japan and Finland listen to music on their mobiles the least.

Teens are now using their mobiles to simultaneously access information, communicate and have fun. The teen mobile phone market is competitive and lucrative; but it is clear that by developing phones that deliver an engaging user experience across applications, such as texting, listening to mp3s and playing games, mobile brands can attract a new teen audience to their devices.

The objective of Android -- as with Google's participation in the US government spectrum auction earlier this year -- is to move the entire mobile industry forward by opening it up. If Google succeeds, on the shoulders of the iPhone's early success, it will benefit consumers and, ultimately, Google.

More than any other single event the launch of the iPhone last year catalyzed the mobile market, which had been in state of sleepy evolution for years. But the Apple device kicked everyone in the rear and kicked the market into high gear. We can effectively date the mobile internet like this: "BI" and "AI" (before iPhone, after iPhone).

n the U.S., 28.4 percent of subscribers now have a 3G device vs. the five largest countries in Europe, which have a combined penetration rate of 28.3 percent.

Within Europe, Italy has the highest 3G penetration at 38.3 percent; Spain comes in second place with 37.2 percent. The U.K. has a penetration rate of 19.9 percent, and Germany has 23.9 percent and France has 12.6 percent.

The U.S. also eclipses the five European countries when it comes to number of users with a 3G device. The U.S. has 64.2 million vs. Europe, which has 63.4 million.

Perhaps an even bigger problem is that both Facebook and MySpace fail to offer an optimized version for Japanese handsets. Millions of Japanese are accustomed to using one thumb, a dialpad and a jog dial on their phones when accessing the web during their commutes to school and work. In this country, the mobile web is bigger than the PC web.

Offering a country-specific version before a local copycat beats you to it is an obvious key factor for success, and not only in Japan.

Practical experience from the Japanese web industry has shown that partnering up with a local company is the best way to diminish these dangers

the mobile Internet is Steve's best new shot at taking over the world. Safari won't replace IE or Firefox on the desktop, but Apple's strong bet is that the Internet in your pocket will replace your desktop, at least for certain uses.

We get into constant problems with some prosecutor who subpoenas information we don’t want to give them, and we resist it. Which is why we don’t fully operate in China. Our argument is that information is not available in your domain. So countries are now trying to rewrite their laws to say this information cannot be available anywhere on the Internet.

Q: What about mobile? Schmidt: Our wireless initiative was a perfect outcome. It was the cost of an outcome. I am on the board of Apple. Last night I was in Palo Alto and there was a line outside. It shows the device is a step forward. IPhone’s competitors all have dec A phone is GPS, a camera, a computer, and a browser. The Phone is tehfirst one with a really functional browser. We show full ads, so that is a huge for revenues/ The new category of apps that have not come out yet really is a breakthrough. One winner of the Android apps, it looks around, names the buildings it sees and tells you what is happening inside of them. That is a really interesting product. In mobile there are a lot od product that have that WOW factor, because of the use of GPS. I think all the most interesting next-generation social apps will be mobile.

Q: [Sam Whitmore asks if Google does any work for the government related to the Patriot Act] Schmidt: Regarding the Patriot Act or any of the three-letter organizations, absolutely not. We do provide the federal government with some search and other services through our [government] sales group.

In 2008 there were almost 162 million smartphones sold, surpassing notebook sales for the first time.

By 2013 almost four in every 10 handsets sold worldwide will be a smartphone.

Analysts at Informa Telecoms & Media are predicting that sales of phones using Google's Android operating system will outpace Apple's by 2012.

he European Commission today outlined the main steps that Europe has to take to respond to the next wave of the Information Revolution that will intensify in the coming years due to trends such as social networking, the decisive shift to on-line business services, nomadic services based on GPS and mobile TV and the growth of smart tags. The report shows that Europe is well placed to exploit these trends because of its policies to support open and pro-competitive telecom networks as well as privacy and security.

Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks

The index shows that Sweden and the Netherlands are clear leaders in the EU, thanks to a competition-friendly environment and skilled citizens and businesses that can use advanced services.

User-generated content ranging from social networking to dating and personal content delivery services is expected to grow about 563 percent from a $1.1 billion market today to at least $7.3 billion in 2013

Mobile social networking use will increase from 54 million users today to nearly 730 million in 2013 with the bulk of those users coming from Asia.

さて、ここまで個人ユーザーの視点でiPhoneを語ってきたが、最後にちょっとビジネスの視点から。まぁ日本は一旦この状況(コンテンツまで含めてガラパゴス最適化)が出来上がってしまったので動きはほとんどないと思うのだが、諸外国でどういう動きになってゆくのかが興味深い。特にUS。やっぱPCサイトをモバイル環境で使うのって使いにくくね？　ということにユーザーも提供者側も気づいて各国それぞれのモバイルサイト潮流が勃興するのか、それともPCサイトでいいじゃない！としてPCサイトの表示能力でしのぎを削る戦いに入って行くのか。

This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet. If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money

Mr. Martin’s proposed ruling in favor of openness could actually end up hurting Internet users if it accelerates the nascent moves by the industry to charge customers based on how much data they use instead of offering essentially unlimited data for a flat fee. Add a Comment

“We are going to see the big social networks start to decentralize into a series of social applications across the Web,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think we are at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”

For example, the mobile service company Loopt, based in Mountain View, Calif., helps people find their friends and see what they are doing on a map on their mobile phone. It will use Facebook Connect so its users do not have to re-enter their connections to the friends they want to track.

Sean Parker, a former Facebook executive who now runs Causes, said Facebook was trying to stimulate the creation of more sophisticated applications. “They are trying to evolve to a place where the right companies get funded and they launch more ambitious features on the platform,” he said.

Worldwide sales of mobile phones reached 294.3 million units in the first quarter of 2008, a 13.6 per cent increase over the first quarter of 2007, according to Gartner, Inc.  Sales of mobile phones in Western Europe decreased 16.4 per cent from the first quarter of 2007, the first decline in this region since Gartner began tracking the mobile devices market in 2001.

SAN FRANCISCO--Marketers convened here this week to figure out how best to reach teens on the Internet. The answer: It's all about the mobile phone.

The iPhone is just the beginning of the all-in-one device. Uses of mobile devices will expand to include all kinds of bar code applications and prepaid debit card payment methods,

But, he said, mobile phone providers likely won't succeed as the entertainment leaders for the phone, despite their efforts to sell ringtones, games, and music. Other companies like Apple, Google, and Yahoo will be more effective at "side-loading" the cell phone with services.

Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race.

The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.