The presidential election was without doubt the most important vote on November 4, 2008. There was yet another very interesting and important vote, the FCC voted on what to do with the “white spaces” (frequencies unused after the USA will go to an all digital TV broadcasting system.) The FCC voted 5-0 allowing unlicensed devices to operate in the frequencies formerly used for TV signals. Larry Page calls the wireless broadband technology “WiFi on steroids” on his blog. Initially intended for “customer premises devices” it is a direct competition of WiMAX. It might prove a threat to mobile (3G/4G) as well, but comparable to how iPhone uses WiFi.

I have been enthusiastically reporting on Amazon’s cloud activities lately. And yesterday they launched yet another interesting service. They launched a content delivery network called Amazon CloudFront. This content delivery framework makes your S3 bucket (sorry for the lingo) accessible through a domain of your choice. But not from one location, no from the location geographically near. With the familiar ‘pay as you go’ model they charge for actual downloaded GBs. Europe and US are cheapest, but Hong Kong and Japan also have edge locations.

Microsoft’s most important product (line) is Microsoft Office. Certainly on the PC, but also on the Mac, it is the de facto standard in office productivity. Google Docs are heralded as the next evolution in office productivity. But Balmer is not so scared of Google Docs. His direct competition in office productivity comes from OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, he responded when asked about Google Docs. As with Linux these products has taken their time to mature. But with 3 million downloads in the first week the lates release can be called a blockbuster. But still Google will be their worst nightmare, only somewhere else, a phone.

29 billion what? A loan? The price the US government is willing to pay for AIG? No, it has nothing to do with financial crisis. Last week Amazon reported a growth 30% in storage objects the last quarter, they went up from 22 billion objects to 29 billion objects. It is still a mystery how much total GB (gigabyte) or TB (terabyte) or PB (petabyte) they are storing for their customers. But they revealed that their peak load is 70.000 transactions per second. This is what virtualization looks like, HUGE economies of scale. (Their price plans offers reduced cost per GB for customers storing more than 500 TB!!!)

With 7 days to go the presidential elections in the USA are coming to a close. With ‘important republicans’ supporting Obama it appears to be a done deal. But until the polls close you never know what the result will be. Obama needed almost 2 years to get where he is now. I thought elections culminated on 1 day. It now appears to be an illusion in this era of time-shifting. With postal voting and early voting d-day has changed to deadline. And I expect this presidential election to turn into an anticlimax.

In the home of the brave there is a ‘raging battle’ for the next leader. It is no surprise the McCain-Obama battle is getting increasingly nasty. But with endorsements by influential republicans Obama appears to be the clear winner. Voting for a president is usually done once. But in the land of the free democracy has dramatically changed the last year and a half. The Obama campaign has just announced to have reeled in $150 million in funds during september alone. Obama gave the people not 1 vote but many, transforming politics with the true power of networking.

With the global financial crisis everyone is full of ‘responsibility’. The financial institutions should have taken their responsibility, as should have the those who can’t afford the mortgage they have. And if you borrow something you can’t return you are not very responsible. But I think we have not been paying attention to what responsibility actually is. Ever since we consider ourselves enlightened we confuse moral responsibility with responsibility. If you deconstruct responsibility it follows that consensus and regulation are very important. But the essence of responsibility is that it only works when you are held responsibility, perhaps by yourself…

Wal-Mart is notorious for the role of employment in their operations. As a hallmark of modern industrial management it has transformed reducing cost to an art form. And true to their corporate charter of optimizing profits only the law will keep them in check. And law is law only when you get caught, apparently. After a process of years the court of Minnesota judges that Wal-Mart did break the law. At $ 1,000 fine per violation Wal-Mart faces up to $ 2 billion in damages, in Minnesota alone. This is 17% of their net income over the last 12 months.