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It is a weird Friday… there will be huge news in a few days, albeit on the personal side and thus may or may not interest you, nevertheless I’ll make sure to post that “update” as soon as I can…

In the meanwhile, I try to keep up with the Joneses and here it is… Friday Finger Food is served, a touch sparingly…

• Dell seems to get into troubles.. new biz models, new ventures, new market and competitors are putting the entire industry under a strain of changes, and when you add layers to your distribution model, troubles may arise.. and earnings alerts are due…
• SOA was a technology darling some months ago, then Web 2.0 came, and to top all up some corporate IT techies are now back on to virtualisation, security and the lot… back to basics???
• Tough days ahead for venture capitalists??? The Street goes directly to sunny California… seemingly…
• A second Internet? More secure?? How??? 
• Sony is dancing for its latest victory (you know, BluRay…) and some bells are tolling already…
• Nevermind if the bells are those of music phones, expected to rise in popularity this coming months!!!

And more.. I knew I had to go back and play a bit of chess, now I am on the ol’skool side, and before I can get this social it will take forever… and there would me more stuff, and it is all the more unfortunate I have been called into a meeting provoked, incidentally, by that news I will illuminate you all next week!

In the meanwhile, have a great weekend!!!

Asus eee PC… GOT IT!!!! First impression..

It was Saturday.. outside the city wasn’t as busy as usual, yet.. I opened up my fatty 15.4″ laptop and thought.. why not have the little one a go!??!?! My girlfriend saw it some days ago on a magazine, I saw one at the Enterprise 2.0 conference…what the heck, it is just €299, it won’t be all that bad if the thingy is just a blunder… so, I went and hunt for the Asus eee PC!!!!

First, find a place where it was still in stock or sold, as a matter of fact, since hard-to-find tech gadgets make the object itself some sort of an icon straight from day one.. provided the tech-thing is worth the while..

So, I found an Asus Point the other side of town, I jumped into a pair of combats and my boots, girlfriend was fast enough to get the car key in a matter of seconds, shoot out, jump into the Mini and set the GPS up!!

Milan was sort of waking up in a decent sunshine.. spring is almost here, so what’s nicest that have a little, smart, light and fun PC to go out and hunt for WiFi spots??? To be on a beach with nothing to do but sunbathing, I guess, but since we are in town..

Shop was where it was supposed to be, too many people for my liking, but thanks heaven I called before hitting the street, and THE LAST ASUS eee was already booked in my name!!! I could then sit back and relax, waiting for my turn in the cue…

Some ten minutes after, we were outside the shop, holding a smallish box, something like the size of a weekly magazine and a palm thick… the little guy was there, lurking at us from a plastic foil protecting its pale white complexion… back home I let Antonella get the baby out and start playing with it, but after a few hours charge, since the battery was absolutely flat!!

After having spent this waiting in weekly shopping trips, finally the eee went “live”… no more than 30″ and the screen was popping with a start up screen, a matter of seconds to type in name, date, time, the usual stuff and there it was!!!

A nice, tabbed screen with some magic words such as work, entertainment, web, stuff like that!!! So, where to begin???

First.. the overall feeling is of a sturdy little pc, the size of a decent paperback, light as light can be (less than a kilogram..), keyboard is clearly on the small side, and yet is fin to type in, I have to say that I am not really a giant, and my hands are quite small, still, the baby is not made for creating your next trilogy the likes of the lord of the rings, so…

All applications are nicely grouped under “tabs”, the same you have in any decent Web browser… it is all there, ready for you to use! The entire office suite is the Linux version (yep, the entire machine is running on Linux, should you do not know that already!) of OpenOffice, thus dead easy to use, pretty compatible with most of your documents, will do for some work whilst you are out!

Connectivity… the usual Ethernet modem connection which, damn, forces me to wait and try the baby on the web, got a tragic USB modem but, wait… WiFi!!!!! There is a little icon on the bottom left of the tab-screen, why not having a go.. mind you, I still haven’ t got WiFi at home (lazy, waiting to buy an Airport Extreme…), but, eventually, there were some six or seven around.. of which two open, and nicely ranked with an “intensity percentage”… got an87% and bam, there it was, into the Web. Just like that, no configuration of any sort, no hassle, nothing, just hit “connect” after having selected the access point, and wait a few secs..

Firefox was up and running (yep, no configuration, installation, nothing, it is all done for you beforehand!!), fair enough the screen (7″) is not exactly massive, yet it does the job quite nicely.. access speed, downloading and the rest of the web experience were in the norm, so quite fast, not an hiccup, nothing at all.. several kind of web sites, with different graphical layout and “intensity” have been downloaded and rendered without problems.

I wrote some stuff, responded to a few mails, Antonella checked for a new couch on the IKEA site, all in the norm! The baby was there, ready to answer our performance calls!!!

Photo upload was hassle-free… put in your SD loaded with your favourite pictures, click on the “Open” and there you are..

Haven’t tried Skype (pre-loaded…) yet, nor the webcam, but the beginning of the eee era in my flat are pretty fine!!!!

Most interesting feature.. do not know, really, it is the ease of the experience that is stunning, something that could remind me of some tales about the Apple MacBooks and such… the start up time is great, very very fast, battery lasted one day and half of pretty intense usage…

Should you buy it??? As a second PC, something seemingly reliable, packed full with all-you-need-applications, easy to use, WiFi enabled, yes, it is a definite yes!!! As your only machine I would actually think twice about the choice, keyboard too small and some work to do with external storage may hinder the fun!!!

If you bash into it, get the card out and get one!!!!! Your lifestyle as modern, city like chaps will have a boost and, seriously, you won’t pass unnoticed!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE: when I went about the “one day and half” battery life, clearly I didn’t mean that the eee was actually ON for all that time, it meant I used it half of Saturday and the whole of Sunday on and off, doing things for tens of minutes each go.. you know the going..

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What a week!!!! Had to work pretty hard, a couple of days spent in conference, some stress to build up a significant activity over this 2.0 stuff everybody (still) want to know about, plus a stack of book to read are looming from a corner in my lounge, my shoulder is sort of painful after kickboxing on Tuesday (fun, fun, fun nonetheless!!!), and seemingly, my snowboarding trip over to Livigno is not going to happen.. nevermind the buzzcocks, Finger Food is here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• Nanotech coupled with the “auto-functioning” of DNA molecules to assemble nanotubes structures and… the sky’s the limit, according to some IBM research..
• Gates on video to give us glimpses of the strategic thinking behind some of the latest Microsoft adventures.. which, incidentally, is something Sergey Brin finds hard to digest as much as stone cold prawn curry for breakfast!!
• Meanwhile, Microsoft goes Open!! Whooooops…..
• And everybody’s on the move, these days, including MySpace trying to regain the former glory with some walkabouts into music business..
• The media World is getting heated up.. BBC and iTunes, Vivendi launches Zaoza (chinese for “word of mouth”…) to revamp the former Vizzavi disaster (I told them what to do back in 2002, they didn’t…) with a new hope!! Which do not include Apple in the recipe…
• More.. I am obliged to quote that the DVD new format war has been won by Blu-ray against HD DVD.. now, if you just consider the potential marketing activities and the overall appeal of the two “names” (without even considering some more tech specs) you should have spotted the winner since long ago, before the “war” was even remotely started..
• I have just posted an Homo 2.0 and somewhere in the post I mentioned the concept of “GridBraining”.. there you are, Kluster!! Like the idea, like to hope mankind is slightly more interesting than expected and proposed by lobotomy prone TV… well done chap..
• More on green initiatives, hyper cities and environmental studies.. grid, grid….brain, brain..
• Man is the center mantelpiece.. Microsoft is heading towards enabling the most powerful of all GUI, man himself!! Voice and touch… and considering the explosion of touchscreens in mobile phones… you make up your mind… ah, by the way, crowdsourcing or GridBraining also in the Xbox next game palette????
• On the other side of the tech, there is still the Force you may want to rely upon, to bypass that hiccup you call DSL, so there it it, the new Lucas game.. ok, silly intro, nevertheless I love the thing!!! And there is a new engine to enhance the overall physics of the game, Digital Molecular Matter.. whoops, it is a game, after all!!!

Do you remember the story of that French bank, what was the name, ah, yes, Societe Generale, going head over heels because of a GordonGekko wannabe? There is seemingly a herd on the loose, since UBS, a slightly large Swiss bank, has got some similar problems… meanwhile, why not using tech properly, also to boost the economy?? Evolution does asks for its toll, sometimes, and quite sadly this time is Polaroid to go into the “nice memories” chest of drawers..sad, too sad…

An attempt to buy out 3Com by Chinese Huawey (IBM; PCs owners, remember??) has been immediately stopped as a matter of national security.. or something the likes.. More on 2.0, now is about free publishing of scientific papers, PLoS, a nice add after the YouTube for scientist, Scivee, that made my blog booming with hits when I posted about (OK, just because I put “…Tequila” in the title, spelled wrong, btw..).

How about moving contents from SecondLife to “Multiverse”??? Will SL grow to platform-status for other than socialising??? we said so.. nevermind IBM launched a 3-D datacenter in OpenSim..

And plenty more stuff… China does not like US to go about shooting in the sky,  Serbs do not like Kossovo being independent and make sure the World knows about their feelings, Facebook faces its first decline in zillion of months of steep growth (look out for a new 2.0 champion!!!) (but do not say it too loud, yet..), and Google goes on the Moon!!!!

OK, let’s stop it here, there is a computer-addict syndrome looming ahead!!! So head for the beach, hit the slopes with your boards, do something unspeakable with your lovey-lovey, but heck, leave that keyboard!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or, otherwise, see you next week!!!

Peace.

Notes and unstructured thoughts on 2.0… Homo 2.0???

I have to admit, this blog is also very useful to have all your notes in one place, some sort of repository of (hopefully) fairly intelligent thinking…

So, since I will have to work pretty heavily on the entire spectrum of the 2.0 saga, I have to jot down some notes… ah, yep, I will be part of the discussion tables at the closing event of the IDC Innovation Forum that will be held in Milan next March (here is the info and whereabouts of the Forum), with the likes of Don Tapscott, Derrick De Kerckhove and a stack of Web pundits, artists and creatives, it will be a blast, believe me!!

Right, so… notes… the evolutionary path is, quite nicely indeed, a sort of step back to the village-like, tribal relationships of the societies pre-industrial revolution. There is a reprise, this time thanks to technology and with no Luddites in sight, of the necessity to exchange human relationship with the “piazza” of my liking.

It is even more important aspects of this evolution. Globally, you may have noticed, there is a massive outburst of social-related activities, themes, actions, whatever… green campaigns, humanitarian efforts, sustainable economies, cultural crossovers, it is a huge mixing, bridging, communicating, helping.. it seems like there is a real, planetary conscience that is guiding some acts of a large number of people.

I happened to discuss this with some Web experts at the recent Enteprise 2.0 conference and with a couple of university professors in the past couple of weeks, and we were all very interested of the implications. The question was whether it is the Web-network evolution that have ignited the process or it is rather a genetic attitude of mankind to seek for the community that has enabled the Web to become the social network we know today. The more techy amongst us actually feel like the hype and the “media” coverage upon Internet since the early 2000s is the real engine of this renewed planetary surge of the masses, whilst there has been a flimsy quoting the Band Aid in1984 as potentially the first massive conscience raising that have triggered the necessity to a better and more tight communication amongst actors in the social canvass… nice altogether.. guess we can really state that all the most innovative or evolutionary tech advances stem from a “communication” need, that is for sure..

What is more interesting it the actual disintegration of some capitalistic logics thanks to the Web and the social implication deriving from an hyper-connected World. The shift of power from producers to users is a substantial change in the orthodoxy and liturgy of the economy rite. What is indeed scarcely perceived and increasingly kept under the radar by who-knows-who is the actual revolutionary power of the Web as it is structured nowdays. It would be possible to reorganise and determine social canvasses, political agendas, country foreign political position by the power of referral, by free-flowing information, by scarcely controllable exchange of view points by geographically dispersed groups of people.. you know what I intend, being “discussant” is ever more powerful than simply being “listener”.. yet, this is kept under control by painting the entire “thing” as a youngish, sort of head-in-the-clouds stuff, the social Web is about SecondLife, some music sharing quite often via illegal platforms, photos, videos and rubbish like that.. you know, young stuff has never been very dangerous.. whilst the reality is about a massive net of brains working in well determined and shared directions.

I am personally stressing the concept of “brain-sourcing” as the highest effect of the “crowdsourcing” phenomena or the entire social evolution of the Web.. more so, why not using “GridBraining”????

So, it is a new specimen of human being that is born before our eyes or it is simply a permutation of the actual?? Is the Web something we use, we live, or is a prosthetic of our selves??? There is something like an “Homo 2.0″??? Video of my presentation at the Turin School of Business (audio in italian, for the slides let me know,  it is IDC stuff and copyrighted..) … More to come…

Enterprise 2.0 and an interested Italian audience

Just back in the office after a long two-day conference, held in Milan, on Virtualisation and Enterprise 2.0. I run as speaker and chairman some of the sessions yesterday and the entire of today’s discussion on E2.0.

Admittingly, I have tried to get all speeches and presentations on Monday as a sort of preparation for today big show.. I trust it went real fine!!!

Virtualisation technologies and SOA strategies have, admittingly, set up the enterprise IT environment to dynamically absorb all potential changes stemming from the E2.0 evolution. Most interestingly, we run a small in-conference survey on SOA perception, and over 50% of respondents admitted SOA was a fundamental pillar to respond efficiently to any potential market change. Very little about the techology complexity mix, very little about the nitty-gritty details on virtualisation (despite an hefty presence of VMware…), a lot of attention and feedback on the implied strategic and business changes SOA may enable. Cool.

Today the event went even better.. the room was full of very interested attendees, and the conversation, thanks to the two opening speeches, was directed toward the Web 2.0 social impact and the aftermath within the enterprise environment. The Q&A session went on forever (had to stop it at the end, quite an unique occurrence, I dare say..), the audience was most interested into networking math theories, Barabasi, adaptive systems and the complexity theory… questioning was raising towards the panel (myself, the italian managing director of Viadeo, Pietro Gentile, vice president of Intermedia and journalist expert in 2.0 topics, Claudio Pasqua, SEO and an early enthusiast of social networking and evolutionary web theories) as to address all those issues, asking for some clarification on likely futures opening up in front of the business community, about personality “caching” and data security, the evolution of Second Life and synthetic worlds… honestly, up until yesterday I had in front of me an audience that, when listening to such topics, coupled with words such as “change”, “strategy”, “evolution” et alia, most time was head-shaking, smiling, doing all sort of body-language mix up as to say “rubbish”..

We have all being absolutely stunned by the response, the interest, the willingness to know more and act accordingly. I have also to admit, there is very little knowledge on the fundamentals of the complexity theory, small worlds and the rest of, say, Barabasi thinking are far from being well distributed and understood, and yet I trust there is a massive change in approaching the systemic evolution of the enterprise into a rather more performing, market aware and “discussion-driven” actor. These are good news, more to come as soon as I have gathered some feedback and organised my thoughts!!

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One year ago I was engaged by an organisation to revamp their internal structure and to revise their Web strategy to make the most of the social evolution Internet was consolidating into a massive evolutionary step. So, I said to myself, guess it is about time you do start to participate, dive into the synthetic world, experience to the fullest possible extent.

Now, considering that the entirety of what is around actually fits all, I decided that writing down some stuff would have suit me fine, adding some bits and bobs along the road.. so, one year ago this blog saw the cyber-light!!!!

It has been quite an amazing year, now that I come to think to that, I have significantly changed the way I do work, the way I experience the World around, my thirst for new “things” has exponentially augmented and, in parallel, I notice that the more I have enlarged my personal boundaries (provided I have any at all), the more a subtle feeling of dissatisfaction was crawling alongside the more positive feeling of being exploring a path to the future (or whatever it may be, good fun nonetheless…).. it may be what a professor was calling “mediatic illnesses”… a strange group of pathologies that stem out from the endless crossroads, opportunities, possibilities, connections, informations.. it comes from abundance, pretty much like obesity for the First World countries comes out of the utter food abundance..

Nevertheless, I love being in this time-space location, it is ever so interesting, a damn evolutionary ditch we are about to jump and surpass, love to see what is on the other side.. provided we avoid the curse looming over 2012!!!!

So, whilst I am singing “happy birthday to 88days!!”, you may well keep on and enjoy this Friday’s Finger Food!!!!

• Whilst the entire World is getting ready for a-smartphone-in-every-hand approach Barcelona seems to suggest, someone is arguing that even a champion of consumer digitalisation such as Apple may start feeling the hard truth behind a recession… a CMO stated that the first cutback in consumer expenditure should and potentially will be in entertainment and then on home improvements.. maybe in US, I recall a similar survey for Italy and we are supposed to cut back on food.. what about all those assumptions are a pile of rubbish, particularly when set up to justify an already-defined position?? My thought, mind you…

• Future??? Look eastwards, towards the rising sun..

Japan’s 100 million cell-phone users represent the most diverse—and discriminating—pool of mobile subscribers on the planet.

• I still believe, as it was back in early 2000s, Japan may have some lessons to give out.. watch out in Shibuya, Omotesando and Ginza, should you like to be an high tech leader in the coming years…

Says software engineer Ken Wakasa: “People’s expectations are very high here compared to other regions. That’s why we get good feedback.”

And it is all about “expectation economy”, for those of you still there to understand what the experience economy is (was, fool, was)!! You don’t care? Fine, history will forget about you ever existed at all..

• Incidentally, most big guys including Intel do believe the World is going to be curious, fast paced, full of expectation and mobile… there you are, dished out.. (more on silicon chips here and here… a nice war is undergoing???)

• And, furthermore, there is an increased attention in building up conglomerates of must-have brands working sort of holistically together, such as some talks between Nokia and Google are actually suggesting.. markets are getting slightly complicated, much better to lock in customers in a well defined experience than having them wandering about..

• It is complicated by tech, economies, geopolitical trends and also by the chromosome sets you may have.. men love user-generated contents, women like streaming.. you do whatever you like with these insights, on top of painting gizmos in titanium grey or fluffy pink …

• And Dell buys a e-mail service provider, MessageOne, as to compete with MS and Google… so, what, the competitive scenario will get further complicated? Hardware vendors are trying to lock in with some puffed up brand equity the end users?? Ah, right, something like Apple, then….

• Yesterday a journalist asked me about Web 2.0 and its impact over the financial services, and there was a question about what banks do in SecondLife.. going away from it, as it seems… banks may be slightly more worried about the impact of global crisis, and less about avatars… won’t discuss any further, should you love chatting about it, let me know and I will oblige happily..

And, more.. let alone the above mentioned wars and squabbles, the social networking arena is also adding to the scenario complexity, M&A all around… (interesting, if cleared from some silliness such as these..); Murdoch builds up a Web sort-of incubator, whist chatting about with Yahoo..ops… get one out of many Barcelona Mobile World Congress reports…LBS and maps, plus mobile advertising to come, ouch!!

NY Times made the headlines when decided to have a free-for-all Web version of the daily, now it is cutting down by a 100 its editorial jobs…. Japan seems to be out of doldrums..

And, yes, now quitting Facebook is getting slightly less complicated.. not that my post had anything to do with it, clearly!!!

Fine, there we are… I desperately want to close this week, the opening of the next one will be smashing, I have to head a two-days conference in Milan about virtualisation and enterprise 2.0, hope I can report about the outcomes! In the meanwhile, have a nice weekend!!!!

NOW mobile operators start whinging about being “just pipes”…

Barcelona event is setting up an utterly dynamic environment for each and every mobile user; communication capability dramatically improve in speed and reliability, handsets are becoming the real next-big-thing with their “smart” declination, the outer Web has long since transformed in a social platform able to let you grow, learn, interact and ultimately “be” whomever you like.

In this terribly interesting ecosystemic shake off, mobile operators realise they have been hedged, or rather they are loosing client’s ownership, provided they ever had it…  quite rightly Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, stated that pundits such as Google or Yahoo have so far delivered a better “mobile experience” than operators’, which is altogether pretty weird, if you come to think to the starting points for both this industry conglomerates..

You know what??? I recall working with some of the big guns in the mobile industry, right at the verge of the UMTS era, say some five years ago, and the overall, consistent, solid approach was along these lines: “the network is my capital, so everyone has to pay to use it”, “clients are topping up and there won’t be much of a market share shake off” and, when presented with service strategy such as the Japanese DoCoMo or KDDI, thus based on an aggressive revenue sharing model (roughly speaking: you provide the service, I put in the network, every penny coming from this wedding will be shared accordingly..), I can still hear the words “no way” resounding all around the room…

Those very shortsighted managers did not even consider the possibility to act and plan in a systemic fashion, thus accepting the fact that the entire industry was not revolving just around “them” but there were some concurrent R&D and marketing strategy that were already shaping the marketplace, absolutely and indisputably well defined. By the way, I have a slide deck dated “2002″ proving the above…

So, now doomsday has come… and clients are slipping through the fingers of mobile operators in terms of “attention” and “equity” perception. The crisp money mobile companies did accumulate in the past years now is merely a remnant of what was once an empire.

Admittingly, that could possibly be slightly harsh and not quite accurate, but the message is all about “expectation”, “relative importance” and “experience”. In this sort of strange equation, users expect from mobile operators to have an always-on pipe, quite likely a fast one (HSDPA/HSUPA as tendency) and that is about the end of it.. ah, nop, one more: all-inclusive tariff plans. End of message.

The experience is about handsets ergonomy and usability (I told them, let me boast this!!!), multiple connectivity opportunity, and all the IP based services you can master, plus the media fundamentals, video-photo-sound, at the highest possible level. The rest (thus the pipe) is commodity, pretty much like expecting light when switching on a lamp..

The Vodafone payoff is “Life is Now”… may I remind that someone said that life is that thing happening whist you are busy doing something else, which is probably the case for some of the mobile execs in the recent past…

nvohk… crowdsourcing in management, or a nice try?!?!?

Browsing around, I bashed into a strange sort of a project.. nvohk, of which you find the banner down my sidebar, is a nice attempt to build up a community that will contribute to run (partially) an eco-friendly clothing company..

For a rather smallish annual fee, you are entitled to participate to such decisions as logo design, advertising strategy, marketing et alia… some of the “perks” of being part of this experiment are, I believe, rather intangible, as per the satisfaction to be “in the process” whilst the idea of having about 35% of profit shared with the members in form of “buying certificates” for nvohk products is kind of nice…

Yet, it won’t change the world, it will definitely pump some fresh air into my wardrobe (eventually..), will have me as part of a social-conscious community, and I may say “been there” should the thing really boom up!! Most of all, it is a nice experiment, someone called “socialism 2.0″.. nobody did??? OK, let’s do it from here, then!!!!!!!!!!!!

Life is truly amazing…

2008: escape from Facebook…

… call me Snake…

And with that you thought you could master your way out of Facebook reach!?!?!? Wrong!!

The NYT reported a sort of nightmarish ordeal to have your data removed from Facebook servers once and for all… it actually reminds me of some lines I read some time ago about the spectacular attitude people have got recently in giving out large chunks of owns identities, despite all the fuss about privacy and personal data protection.. we are all cache-ing quite happily our beloved information, much more interested into adding friends to the already almost-useless pile of horrid nicks, without even considering than all those stored infos may be used against our desires, or as it seems will reside forever somewhere in the Net.. is it a new form  of eternity we are all seeking?? Becoming a long string of 0 and 1 is the ultimate in cloning??!?!?

On the serious side, there were already some concerns about the type-happy attitude we have all got, particularly since the idea of sharing infos amongst sites to speed up logging in procedures and such is increasingly under scrutiny..

I believe there was a “dissertation” here (text in Italian) about our online attitude towards sharing-socialising-posting… as said

we are what we browse

we are what we message

we are what we chat

we are what we mail

we are every information we produce, access or transform

and every change we make in the matrix is and always will be us!

Just a thought, mind you…

Mobile and smart, this is the future ahead!!

We have since long heralded these were times of changes, deep and systematic changes, basically an evolutionary step was taken before our eyes.

Yesterday the Barcelona Mobile World Congress slammed the doors open on a brand new future: definitely mobile and incredibly smart!!! All the major handset manufacturers have launched either brand new hyper-powerful phones or revamped massively some ol’darlings.

New specimens that are making all the technofans drooling are popping up about anywhere… SonyEricsson Xperia X1 is one heck of a smartphone, and please notice the nice add of HSUPA connectivity on top of the now-basic HSDPA.. users may start (where available..) enjoying uploading auto-generated contents at a decent speed and thus augmenting the mSocial experience level.. and somewhere there is a S-video connectivity…

Yep, there are the much awaited Gphone prototypes on the catwalk, they cracks open the very concept of “smart” and “phone” suggesting the future may have a simil-mobile-smart-phone form factor to add/substitute the laptop environment… particularly when considering that most of those smarties are yielding a smashing Wi-Fi capability to top connectivity up..

Also check a bunch of Samsung’s.. SGH-G810, a top of the range, feature-full smartphone, its sort of younger brother i200, topping the whole bunch up with the ever-so-gorgeous Soul, and Nokia N78, N96, and the list goes on (why not including the nice and crisp Garmin NuviPhone??)… (btw, thanks to Telefonino.net for the infos…)

You enjoy browsing around..

Bottom line, the platform for a significant change in lifestyle is on, pretty much available to the everyday man, albeit an above-average, well off technofan for the time being, services are all converging into the mobile device to enhance and top up the users’ experience… it is still a matter of understanding where are the systematic users that will immediately shift communication paradigm to embrace the new tech (the posers are not interesting in the long term mobile services uptake..), and how these may eventually relate to the slower tribes/clusters… again, it is a matter of crossing the technology chasm..

One hurdle will be tariffing and data packages.. the easy answer is an all-inclusive monthly fee, plus an ecosystem of pay-per-use third party services, but the basics such as calls, Web navigation (down and upload) and a basic GPS navigation should be easily available and hassle-free… we will see…

Still, on top of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and lots of other such things, we are forced to include a Mobile 2.0?? Already done?? Dunno, but you got the overall idea…

Being “social” will pass through the mobile device in an empowered way, and as we said back in the early UMTS days, the mobile may actually become a super-hub of anyone’s digital lifestyle, able to connect and re-distribute contents and activities to the more bulky, less mobile items of our XXI century experience.. and yep, that includes our beloved laptop!!!

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Fine.. I know I have been lagging a bit recently, but to my partial justification, I have got an hell of a lot of things to do, conference to cover plus a deadly number-crunching exercise to pester my days and haunt my nights!! Plus a few more other stuff…

And, to add to the list, today is not much better.. however, I have to collect as much as possible in Finger Food, as to keep you going until the storm subside!! So, there we are, very little commenting, hot links and have a nice ride!!!!

Being on social networks may also be deadly boring!!

On Microsoft, Yahoo and some Google intervention!

And, wow, Yahoo shares are above the MS offer!!! 

Meanwhile, in Japan who owns the Web owns the future, no Yahoo shares’ selling here!!! 

China is opening its eDoors during the Olympics???? 

Firefox Mobile??? Hidden behind your screen!! 

Developers Kit for the iPhone due on February, as it seems! 

A very mobile “mobile phone”??? huh??? 

Motorola on sale and nobody’s opening the wallet!! 

Dubai is increasingly “dubaiest”!!!! ù

And Spain enjoys it!!! 

Global warming?? So do not waste water, then!!! 

More about water and “green development”. 

Incidentally, LG and “green air conditioning..” 

In the Web, an OpenID is marching fast.. 

And, in times of subprime crisis, the Germans stand solidly!! 

Gosh, bit of a run-down version of Finger Food, but I trust this will do for a few days, I will catch you next week, in the meanwhile, enjoy the weekend, some sunshine should you be around Italy and, why not, the rugby Six Nations games!!!!!

Peace.

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Here we are.. Friday finally!!! A slightly grotty weather outside, sort of dump and warmish, welcomes the arrive of the overly-deserved weekend and, clearly, a new FingerFood session, marked by some eye-popping events..

• The biggest one of which I trust is the hostile offer Microsoft has just launched for buying out Yahoo, a smashing $44.6 billion, aka a 60%+ premium over last stock valuation… it is planned as a potential countermeasure against Google overwhelming power, and yet it is a subtle balancing act the one Redmond is looking to undertake.. merging such as the potential one above are re-defining the marketplace and as such the complexity involved is beyond management comprehension… we shall see more of it, and not sure it will be a nice sight altogether!
• Ah, by the way, is Microsoft also paying for the proposed acquisition of Maven Networks Yahoo is going to close??? Mind you, peanuts.. $150 million….
• In the meanwhile, Google is sort of staying put, missing some analysts’ expectations.. the war is about to blow up…
• So, a nice add is this set of earnings alert… cautious SAP and Sony, whilst Nintendo is still swirling merrily like the jazz I am listening right now!!
• Once we were cyber… and today we are all greener than Ireland!!! Nice one, it seems green tech investments are outpacing those Web-related ..
• The US telecom world is getting sort of static and complex at the same time.. say that, after having distributed technology and some advanced solutions, now it is a matter of understanding how to improve service bundles???
• Incidentally, Motorola suggests it may sell or spin off (you name it..) its cell phone division, given the on-going slipping off in the global ranking since the 2004 Razr success… (an eye on the actual results from Kodak should eventually be a nice reading on how to spin off effectively, or else…) … Samsung climbed at 2nd via superior R&D efforts, ruthless quest for top notch design and an eye to tech specs… there will be what?? An Asian powerhouse to face the full Nokia blow??? nice…
• Amazon is sooooo busy now assembling Kindles, that you may not find someone sending you a paperback… demand rising, everyone’s happy, then!!

And more.. whilst shopping heavily, Microsoft has got also time to set up an Innovation Lab in Dubai, the war on HD formats is still on despite, admittingly, BlueRay has got that something more in terms of branding capability(HD DVD, please..) … China starts to face the hard truth, being part of the global gotha of market-driven countries comes with some hardship as well..  and, and, and… and I have to jump into an unforeseen meeting before running off Milan for the weekend..

So I must say.. this is it for now, have a nice weekend you all and catch you next week… a busy one, mind you, having to present the evolution of “Homo 2.0″ as I called the social implication of the more famous Web 2.0 impact.. than I will be off and give a speech on virtualisation strategy and impact over the Enterprise 2.0 evolution.. gosh.. hope someone will soon consolidate the Something 3.0, I am getting slightly bored… See you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!