Microsoft has announced it will discontinue its Encarta product line. Not really a surprise, considering the rise of Wikipedia as a source quality information. But I wonder why they discontinued it already. It might be that this product is ‘hemorrhaging cash’, to use the words of Alan Moore. But we might be witnessing the first skirmishes of a strategic repositioning. Encarta is a high overhead, traditional product. But what low overhead, innovative product will be replacing Encarta? Is Microsoft going to compete with Wikipedia? Or, as they state in their discontinuation notice, are they targeting education primarily? Interesting to note that one of the areas where Jimmy Wales envisions a Wikipedia transformation is education…

Crisis, probably the most used word of the last 6 months. But crisis for one means opportunity for another. Amazon’s stock has nearly doubled since January, for example. Oracle has rebounded to 2008 levels where everyone is still lagging behind. And with recent rumours that IBM is taking over Sun (and MySQL) the JAVA stock has regained some of its historic shine. In the spotlight, Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz says “free is a universal price, requires no currency translation, and reaches the longest tail of the market.” But that doesn’t really cover all the ground, I think. It is not about money, money is just the excuse. With current economic conditions reluctance to part with former partners is not all decisive anymore. Calling an account manager to say you will be spending your money differently next year is just not so scary anymore…

The financial ‘world’ has been driving progress from a certain wisdom. Even though we didn’t really understand what we were doing with products like derivatives, we all thought they worked. In cosmology we have the same situation. We have a model (the concordance model) that we can satisfactorily use to calculate and predict. But it gives no clue what the universe actually is. We actually can only ’see’ 4%, the other 96% is dark, matter or energy. How to deal with a system of which 96% is unknown, only inferred?

The winner of the Android Developer Challenge was an application called Locale. With Locale I can manage the settings of my phone based on where I am, similar to your timezone settings on your computer. The difference with your computer is that the Android determines its location automatically AND I make my Android move around all the time. The creators of Locale combined these characteristics and created an app that lets me configure my phone based on where I am. With Locale my Android is Situation Aware, it transforms virtuality to reality. The obvious example is to turn off your sound when entering a movie theater. The neat thing is that I can graphically (Google Maps) group several of these locations one situation. This way I can also change my ring tone when in the office, another obvious example. Twittering where you are is standard, and with the Locale SMS plugin I can even send an SMS when I enter a situation. How would you use this? What is your application?

The popularity of the iPhone is enormous. And most of the iPhone users become instantly addicted. When their iPhone is challenged they suddenly become passionate, sometimes even offended. And I have to admit that since Android I do understand why you would want an iPhone. One of the most heralded features is its openess to developers, YOU can upload any app you want. I don’t want to discuss this myth (well marketed message) but as it turns out the iPhone users don’t benefit (yet?) They do go to the store, download, and try the apps. Your app will fair better being on the top 100. But the top 100 apps are disregarded just as easily. You might expect a payed app would be more interesting, but not significantly. Perhaps not surprising but the survey shows only games do well. A couple of weeks ago Apple celebrated its 500 millionth dowloaded app. But what is it worth if they are all one-hit-wonders?

In the days when we were still all on our dotcom cloud Amazon started a silent revolution. While we were building our walled gardens they radically changed direction, Amazon opened up. July 2002 Amazon Web Services was launched and from then on everyone could piggyback on Amazon’s accomplishments. With the inception of Amazon Mechanical Turk they showed they were serious. But lately this silent revolution op opening up is really starting to impress me. Late last year Amazon’s cloud computing platform (EC2, S3, etc.) was officially released, and we started paying for our servers per second. IBM is offering development version of their products for free. We only run a backup server for as long as it needs, it only ‘exists’ when it is necessary.

In a previous life I worked for Chello Broadband. In the late nineties Chello was incubated to add services to cable broadband. One of the things we did was ’steel a portal design’ and fill it with content from content providers. We even had a special person for this: VP Licensing. Naturally this model of content distribution is all but extinct (in the mobile industry you keep seeing operators with ambitions to own the user through a portal.) Users don’t pay for television content on the web. But the web is not going away. ESPN still needs to make some money for what they do. So they devised a new ’scheme’, and their freshly recruited VP of Licensing is visiting ISP’s with an offer they can’t refuse: pay or we deny access to your users. Perhaps a little bit new wine into old wineskins. But definitely a delicious interpretation of Net Neutrality. Do you think ESPN has discovered the new business model for content?

Nearly 20 years ago three guys from the University of Sussex were looking for dark matter. But shooting electrons on carbon rods they accidentally created a third elementary form of carbon. The buckminsterfullerene was good for a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1996) but figuring out what to use it for has taken its time. We have come to recognize this molecule as an antioxidant or electron vacuum cleaner. Exploited in cosmetics and medicine we slowly understand this particular feature. But ‘fullerene technology‘ is still in the early stages of its life cycle. A buckyball with ‘protuberances’, for example, is found to help mice battle MS. Perhaps friendly because it is  disguised as a soccer ball, but still nanotechnology that is changing your life! Do you mind?