According to a new report from tech research firm Forrester, the smartphone as a standout mobile category is a shaky paradigm with rapidly shifting parameters. The emergence of mobile operating systems, the ability to install and run third-party apps, and the wide availability of multimedia features (camera phones, video phones, and MP3-playing phones abound) have all been game-changing developments in the mobile field, but they are quickly becoming commonplace. According to a recent New York Times feature, around 50 percent of mobile devices will be "smart," multimedia-enabled gadgets within the next three to four years, and these devices could constitute a full 90 percent of the mobile market by 2015. So, what defines a smartphone as all phones become smarter? What is the exact trajectory of the mobile learning curve? Sponsor First, multimedia features such as multi-megapixel flash cameras, video playback, MP3 players, widgets, email, social network access, and Internet browsers are becoming the new standard for mobile devices. Right now in Western Europe, more than 80 percent of handsets have cameras, with MP3 capabilities for around 60 percent and video on about half of existing devices. Second, competition with Apple's iPhone has prompted OS innovation in a trickle-down effect. Google's Android, the Blackberry Storm (which sounds like some kind of Blizzard flavor but is actually a full touchscreen device without the mobile manufacturer's signature-if-clunky QWERTY keyboard), Palm's competitively priced Pre, and devices from HTC and Nokia have all garnered well-deserved interest in recent months. And though the iPhone still holds a significant amount of the high-end mobile market share, the number of devices sold still pales in comparison to the number of Blackberry users, for example, which leaves lots of room for smartphone competitors. Third, devices that were once top-of-the-line are now moving toward mid-range prices, meaning that more and more consumers will have access to smartphone technology. This poses a significant threat to GPS systems, low-end video cameras, and MP3 players, all of which can look to pagers and PDAs as the ghosts of Christmas yet to come. These "adjacent sectors," as they're termed in the Forrester report, can also prepare for the mobile future by offering services and content on mobile devices, licensing technologies to hardware manufacturers, improve their own devices to be a couple steps ahead of mobile handsets, and minimize any possible future overlap with mobile offerings. Finally, the report sees major and minor feature sets across all "smart" mobile devices (e.g., Kindle 2 is a poor music player, and the PlayStation Portable is multidimensional but best at games), but the folks at Forrester don't see all the competition as heading toward convergence. "No device," it reads, "is best in breed for everything - and nor will it ever be." Rather, devices will be (or ought to be) classified in the near future based on whether devices/operating systems are primarily extensible through apps (think iPhone) or fundamentally "open" (think Android), whether they are best used to create or consume content, and whether they are more suited to utility or entertainment. Another prediction is that of continuing fragmentation in mobile software offerings. Apple devices will continue to run on Apple software; HTC, however, creates handsets for Android and Windows. Sony needs a replacement for Symbian's UIQ; and Palm, Samsung, LG, Nokia, and Motorola need to develop winning strategies for the smartphone game. Microsoft and Google each need to work to improve their offerings and increase adoption rates. None of these facts points to a winner-takes-all conclusion, or even a two-party system such as we now see with personal computers (sorry, Linux - you're still our favorite hobby OS). In a word, there will be plenty of healthy variety and a device and OS for every kind of mobile user in Forrester's version of the future of mobile. Discuss

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PhoneGap is a very interesting development platform for mobile applications that lets developers build apps that work for multiple devices, including the iPhone, using only HTML and Javascript. That means far more people are able to develop mobile applications. Recently, though, Apple has been rejecting an unusual number of apps built with PhoneGap from its app store. The company's reasons don't seem clear and developers want to know what's going on. We discuss three possible explanations below, but ultimately the problem appears to come down to the tight control that Apple maintains over the app store and iPhone. Sponsor PhoneGap developer Mike Nachbaur posted an open letter to Apple on his blog last night about the issue. In this letter, Nachbaur describes a common thread seen throughout multiple rejection letters received by developers: that PhoneGap apps make use of unpermitted or 3rd party APIs, something that violates the terms of service for the app store. Nachbaur argues that such an explanation could be pointing to one of two things - that use of Apple's own controls by PhoneGap is not something the company approves of, or that 3rd party functionality similar to those that let ad networks run on iPhone apps is being rejected by Apple as a part of the core functionality of PhoneGap apps. Apps are reviewed by individuals; some individual reviewers at Apple may not be familiar with PhoneGap and thus not be clear how it works. All of this is quite unclear and we suspect that some of these other explanations may be more accurate. It's also possible that a lot of people are using PhoneGap to build bad apps that deserve to be rejected, but let's assume that's not what's going on and consider some other possibilities. 1. PhoneGap Apps Don't Work With the Next iPhone OS Some developers are complaining that their PhoneGap built apps work with every other version of the iPhone OS but crash when they test them on the beta 3.0 version. The latest version of that beta offered developers a very exciting new feature just this morning - push notification of new messages. That means apps will be able to send SMS style messages when something important occurs. Rumor also abounds that background applications will soon be able to run simultaneously. These sound like really big changes to the iPhone OS and the kind of thing that could make PhoneGap apps more complicated if they are tied between the OS and the browser. PhoneGap competitor RhoMobile says their apps aren't working on the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS either, though we haven't seen any complaints about their developers getting apps rejected yet. 2. PhoneGap's Online Mode is Too Risky PhoneGap has an "online" mode that allows developers to change their apps after they are on phones. Apple may believe that such an option is unacceptable, even though it's understood as something developers need to remove after testing and before application submission. That's a theory offered by French developer Rémy Rakic and it sounds like a possibility to us. 3. Apple May Not Want Cross-Platform Apps The third possibility may be that Apple is rejecting PhoneGap apps because they are cross-platform and could work on Nokia phones or the forthcoming Palm Pre. Presumably many developers would choose the iPhone if they had to choose, and market share could be protected by app exclusivity. ("There's only an app for that here.") Though we think this kind of anti-competitive strategy is more likely to be a convenient result of an actual technical problem. Whatever the reason, one issue that underlies all of the above possible explanations is that the iPhone and app store are controlled enough by Apple that apps aren't something that users can install "at your own risk." Because Apple maintains responsibility for vetting all apps, it may very well limit the technical risks that developers may take in order to innovate. From "unacceptable" content to limitations overcome only by jail-breaking to issues like the ones the PhoneGap community faces now, an absence of openness can come at a real cost for developers and users. We hope this issue gets resolved, but in the meantime, users of this service that democratizes mobile app development must be feeling discouraged. Thanks to Jason Grigsby, co-founder of mobile app development shop CloudFour, for bringing this issue to our attention and discussing it with us. Discuss

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Amazon Web Services today announced the public beta of new features for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The new features purport to allow for simple and automatic monitoring, scaling, and traffic control using cloud resources. "Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers," said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings." Sponsor The new features are threefold. Amazon CloudWatch is a web service for monitoring AWS cloud resources; Auto Scaling permits automatic growing and shrinking of Amazon EC2 capacity based on demand; and Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across Amazon EC2 compute instances. CloudWatch gives Amazon customers visibility into resource use, operational performance, and overall demand patterns, including metrics such as CPU use, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Auto Scaling ensures EC2 usage increases during traffic spikes to maintain performance and decreases during lulls to reduce costs, making it particularly appropriate for apps with frequent use fluctuations. Elastic Load Balancing allows for fault tolerance in applications, detects unhealthy instances within a pool, and reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Amazon hopes these features will improve application performance, lower costs, and make life easier for developers and entrepreneurs. Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, and Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees. Features are currently available in the U.S. and should be available in the EU shortly. Discuss

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3Tera, a California-based cloud computing company, today announced the upcoming launch of their AppStore, a marketplace for cloud components where users can find production-ready, scalable components on a free, trial, or pay-per-use basis. AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools. Sponsor "With the introduction of 3Tera's AppStore, we're enabling a community of software providers to make their products easily available in the cloud and accessible on demand," said 3Tera CEO Barry X. Lynn. AppStore users will find pre-configured, ready-to-use elements from software vendors, many free or offered as trial versions with other appliances offered on a pay-per-use basis. Data center architects and consultants can package and publish ready-to-run app infrastructures, complete with capabilities such as clustered solutions, high availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability, and automated backups and security. Initial AppStore vendors include CohesiveFT, Layer 7 Technologies, SOASTA, Tap In Systems, and Zeus Technology. 3Tera is also seeking additional infrastructure and software vendors to round out AppStore offerings in time for its beta release in Q3 2009. Discuss

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Visible Past is a location-aware learning environment being developed at Purdue University. It is based around the idea that data can be organized using space and time attributes. The team behind the project believes that Visible Past can be used as a learning tool in schools and museums.Practically speaking, Visible Past is a mix of virtual reality, location-based data and a wiki approach. So users of the system not only receive information, but can contribute to it too. Features include social networking and content rating/review. Sponsor The key concept is probably that every piece of data in the system is tied to a location and is time-stamped. All of this data is put into its georeferenced wiki (gWiki), built using MediaWiki. Naturally, because it's a wiki, the Visible Past system is read/write. Visible Past claims to open "read/write capabilities to all clients capable of reading and rendering georeferenced data," such as Google's Maps and Earth, NASA's WorldWind, location-sensitive mobile devices, and immersive VR environments such as Purdue's Envision Center CAVE. It also makes heavy use of wiki content from the likes of WikiPedia, Wiktionary and WikiMedia Commons. Everything is accessible via an Internet-connected device. The way Visible Past works is as follows: "...as a user moves through space (virtual, real, mapped), information tied to locations on the earth will be revealed to them as they approach those locations. Once revealed, the information can be edited and resubmitted (to greater or lesser richness depending on the client), consumed, or ignored. see this Demo page for a video clip of the client functionality we're developing." You can browse by keywords, location or time. In regards to how location and time data is captured, that is done via GPS (e.g. on mobile phones) or through virtual reality locators. Privacy advocates will be wary about the project's tagline, "Where information searches for you". Because the system tracks your location and time, it essentially follows you wherever you go. This is what many location-based web apps do, such as Brightkite. Although most of these apps ensure that the user has sufficient control to turn off and delete their data if they want to. That's the key thing with location-based apps, the user must remain in control. In any case, in a learning environment - which is what Visible Past is aiming for - it's probably a good thing if information finds you. Currently, Visible Past has a limited set of models, such as one of Ancient Rome as it appeared in Antiquity (cca 400 AD), however it's a technology to keep your eye on as we move further in a location data based Web. Slideshow from Slideshare Discuss

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In New York City, on the 16th floor of the Roger Smith Hotel, we caught up with social media superhero Baratunde Thurston, web editor for The Onion. Thurston started getting into this whole "Internet" thing in simpler times when the social web was called Usenet. He now carves out his niche at the overlap of the Venn diagram of comedy, politics, and tech. As an official Internet old-timer who makes it his business to stay relevant, Thurston has particularly useful insights on the business of curating applicable content with great efficiency and timeliness. Sponsor "I remember," Thurston said, "back in 1996 or 1997, when you could finish the Internet... You could stay up until two or three in the morning and go to sleep and know, 'I read the Internet today.'" Simpler times, indeed. So, with the mind-boggling multiplicity of blogs, news sites, and social networks, how does a professional netizen maintain cultural and technological relevance? And what tools does the modern, socially cognizant webmaster use to track and optimize traffic in real time? Call us cruel, but we prefer you watch the video and hear it all firsthand. Discuss

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Version 3.0 of the iPhone operating system is in beta testing among developers and if all the actual and rumored changes come to fruition, the iPhone user experience is likely to be very different soon. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Is_This_The_Future_of_the_iPhone_Push_Background_Bundles';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';In this post we'll take a brief look at three of the biggest changes being talked about: push notifications, background apps and bundled software. Some of these changes are much more likely than others. We've also got a few fantasies about what we wish was coming soon to the iPhone. Sponsor Push Notification System Know how your iPhone displays SMS messages whether you're using the phone or not? Any application you download to your phone will soon be able to display messages like that. This will make the iPhone a much more interactive machine, all throughout the day. Imagine to-do apps sending you push notices when a deadline nears, or location aware social networks when you approach a relevant location or even Twitter when you get a reply or direct message. Users can do some of these things by integrating SMS with other applications now, but it's complicated, costly and unrealistic. Native push notifications could make the iPhone as addictive as the Blackberry - but with a much more compelling interface. Status: Pretty definite, in testing now. Engadget covered this yesterday with a gallery of screenshots. Background Apps One of the most frustrating things about the iPhone is that you can only run one app at a time. That makes extended instant messaging conversations, or even availability, unrealistic. It also makes it hard to switch quickly between apps, let's say you get a Twitter message asking for a photo to be uploaded to Flickr - right now you have to close and open two apps to do that, instead of just switching between them. It's like functional or mental cut and paste, we really ought to be able to switch between apps. Unfortunately it's very processor intensive for the little iPhone to do that. If processing limitations can be overcome then there's battery life, already a huge problem, to consider. Status: Probable but probably a ways off still. Some people say that the push notification system discussed above is a way to get around the desire to run apps simultaneously. TechCrunch has good coverage of this discussion. Software Bundles The UK Register published a post this morning quoting an analyst who says he's heard that future iPhone product plans revolve around differentiation through software packages - not new hardware. This is little more than an analyst-level rumor right now, but it does make a lot of sense. The Register: "For example, Apple could market one 'YouTube' iPhone model with applications that provide video capture, editing and sharing features. Other iPhones might only offer basic video capture - or perhaps no video at all." Business, sports and family focused software bundles would also make sense. Though Apple has had a lot of success in selling applications, most people don't look around a lot at ways to expand any system they purchase. One complication in this scenario is that Apple could risk angering developers by playing favorites between default apps or competing with its own developer community. Further, while jailbreaking your phone is just cute right now - it could look a whole lot more like stealing if you bought one type of iPhone and jailbroke it to gain functionality reserved for other kinds. Such are the problems you get when you combine a development platform with world-changing potency with an environment of pre-packaged control. Status: Rumor. Doesn't seem unlikely, but doesn't seem that appealing either. What Would You Like to See? There's a long list of widespread complaints/requests concerning the iPhone: battery life, video, no MMS, copy and paste, background apps, etc. But is there anything else out there that intrepid developers in our reader community would like to contribute to the list? My fantasy wish list would include a cross-application news feed like the Yelp iPhone app's "nearby feed" that displays reviews written most recently of businesses near your current location. It's so much fun! Why not give me an iPhone capability to view recent content from any of my apps that was geotagged as nearby my location? Tweets, news, music, Yelp, images. That would be awesome. I would also love to see some local syncing with my online activity streams. Imagine if the App store could recommend apps to me based on what I've been bookmarking in Delicious, giving thumbs up on FriendFeed, etc. What other ideas do you have? Here at ReadWriteWeb we both love and hate our iPhones. You'd better believe we're excited for the future of this and other mobile platforms, though. Discuss

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We have seen our fair share of doom and gloom this year, but, according to a report from Bloomberg.com, at least Pandora, the free online music discovery service, expects to be profitable next year. Pandora was founded in in 2000, and derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes. In the interview with Bloomberg, Pandora's founder Tim Westergreen also disclosed that the service is currently adding about 50,000 new users a day, and that the service's successful iPhone app is responsible for bringing in about 20,000 of these new users. Sponsor In January, Pandora first introduced 15-second audio commercials between songs that come up about two or three times per hour. At a recent industry event, however, Pandora's CEO Joe Kennedy predicted that as Pandora's audience grows, the service will also start to add more commercials. Given how annoying traditional radio ads tend to be, Pandora will have to introduce a lot of ads to drive its dedicated users to other services like Slacker Radio or Last.fm's iPhone app, though like other services that started out ad-free, the company has to be careful not to alienate its users as it attempts to become profitable. The service now also shows display ads on its website, which, to be honest, don't seem to fit into the general design of the site and look like they were just added for the sake of it. In the Bloomberg interview, Westergreen also acknowledged that Pandora's struggle with the music industry to negotiate royalty rates could still stop the company from becoming profitable, though Westergreen also said that he is optimistic that these negotiations will come to a positive conclusion for Pandora. Discuss

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Is Google interested in searching the Real Time Web? Are they at all threatened by Twitter? Are Google spiders already so fast that this emergence of Real Time is old news to them? Further fodder for pondering these types of questions was offered by Google co-founder, Larry Page, today at the Google Zeitgeist conference in Hertfordshire, UK. Page says that Twitter has demonstrated that real time search is essential. Loic Le Meur, founder of microblogging service Seesmic and European tech conference Le Web (where this year's topic is the real time web), asked Page today what he thought about Twitter. Page's response was interesting. Sponsor "I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search," Le Meur quotes Page as saying. "At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime." Page's statement comes less than two weeks after Google execs told reporters that the company is looking at ways of integrating microblogging capabilities, such as those popularized by Twitter, into its search product. It's clear that Twitter in particular, and the real time web of status updates in general (most popular on Facebook), is changing the direction Google is going. Google execs probably prefer to talk about Twitter instead of Facebook because they are on friendlier terms with the smaller company and Facebook is closed to outside search. Neither company has a clear corner on the real time market, though. For a look at one type of real time search functionality Google might aim for, check out the newly relaunched OneRiot. (Our review.) Or FriendFeed search. Much more is possible than simple "most recent" search ala search.twitter.com. Relevance has to be figured out on top of timeliness. For an in-depth look at the real time web, see our recent overview titled Introduction to the Real Time Web and yesterday's post on Search Engine Land, where real time and circles of influence (social search, essentially) were identified as Google's two primary weaknesses and likely directions for the future. Discuss

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The iPhone is clearly making some inroads in the business world, and RoamBi, which launched today, is one of the many new companies that is trying to win over some of these business customers. RoamBi's mission is to make spreadsheets readable and browsable on the iPhone (iTunes link), and its designers have done a great job at turning dry and unreadable spreadsheets into highly useful interactive mini-apps. These 'apps' allow users to visualize their data on the small iPhone screen, where they would otherwise be squinting at columns full of unreadable numbers. Sponsor RoamBi, which has quite an impressive team of executives behind it, has two major components, both of which are currently available for free: the iPhone app, which allows you to view your data, and an online app on the RoamBi site, the RoamBi Publisher, which allows users to import data and format it for viewing on the phone. In addition, RoamBi also hosts its own software for managing the interaction between the iPhone app and the web app on Amazon's cloud computing platform. Connect to Salesforce.com - More Enterprise Features Coming Soon Business users will be happy to hear that RoamBi already connects to Salesforce.com, though the company plans to release a full-blown paid version of the service and the RoamBi server, which can be hosted behind a company's firewall, in about three months. In many ways, the current version of the app is only a preview of the full functionality that RoamBi will give to enterprise customers who will be able to license the service's server. Part I: Publisher The iPhone app and the Publisher work hand in hand. The publishing application allows users to upload files or import them from Salesforce.com, decide which view to choose for a specific spreadsheet, modify which tables and columns to display in the new spreadsheet, and then publish the edits to the iPhone. However, once these files are uploaded and published, we couldn't quite figure out if it was also possible to manage these documents (and unpublish them, for example), from the web app. It looks like this functionality is only available from the phone. Part II: iPhone App This isn't really something we expected we would say when we received RoamBi's PR pitch, but the application really makes spreadsheets sexy. While the absence of any editing mode might limit its functionality a bit more than we would have hoped, we have yet to see an app on a mobile device that can do what RoamBi can, and RoamBi's designers clearly know what they are doing. We could describe the different views that RoamBi uses to visualize data in detail, but the best way to get a good feel for the functionality of the app is through the iPhone simulator on RoamBi's homepage. The mobile app is extremely intuitive and manages to transform large spreadsheets, which are usually pretty unmanageable on a small screen, and turns them into small mini-apps which don't just look good, but also work just as you expect them to. The design makes good use of the phone's touch screen, and while some of the views look deceptively simple, the intuitive interface allows you to easily drill deeper into the data. Give it a Try For now, RoamBi is only available on the iPhone, and when we talked to the RoamBi team last week, they told us that they were watching the mobile market carefully, but that the iPhone currently offered the best experience for the kind of app that RoamBi wanted to develop. Given that about 80% of the RoamBi code was developed for the publisher and the server, though, the company should be able to release apps for more platforms relatively quickly. Of course, in a perfect world, RoamBi would be part of an iPhone office suite, where users could not just view data, but also edit it in a similarly elegant user interface, but for now, RoamBi turns accessing spreadsheets on the go into a completely new and surprisingly pleasant experience, and we can only assume that its paid offering will find a lot of thankful users once it is released in a few months. Discuss

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Gmail Labs has done it once again. A new feature introduced today allows users to automatically translate emails into English and any other supported language. Sort of. As with any non-human inter-linguistic interpretations, the messages suffer in translation. But thanks to this new feature, you'll be able to get the gist of the Cyrillic text in your spam folder with just the click of a text link. Sponsor As today's post on the Gmail Blog claims, "If all parties are using Gmail, you can have entire conversations in multiple languages with each participant reading the messages in whatever language is most comfortable for them. It's not quite the universal translators we're so fond of from science fiction, but thanks to Google Translate, it's an exciting step in the right direction." A small step, perhaps, if the screenshots below are to serve as evidence: All in all, not the Labs' most impressive offering to date; nevertheless, it'll save us all a cut-and-paste to a free online translator. Discuss

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This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here. Surfing sure sounds like more fun than work, but when you catch a technology or market wave just right, it seems almost as good. But you need the right-sized wave: Sponsor A tsunami is only for the really bold and well-funded entrepreneur! These are the really, really, really big waves that take decades to roll out. Think Internet, alternative energy, and personalized medicine. If you catch it too early, you'll probably get washed up by the waves that follow. If you catch it too late, you'll be one of about 10 million wannabes. One or two people catch it early and surf it all the way to the end: think Bill Gates with the PC tsunami and Jeff Bezos with the Internet tsunami. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule. A wave is ideal. Waves appear within tsunamis. Within the Internet tsunami, think social networking, SaaS, blogging, online video, paid search, and so on and so on. A ripple is hyped as a wave but peters out before it becomes one. Distinguishing the early stage of a wave from that of a ripple is very hard. There is no magic formula to doing this right. If it were easy, then everybody would get it right and there would be no opportunity. So, the only way to distinguish ripples from waves is to use the wisdom of Pooh Bear... The Pooh Corner Debates If you have never read a Winnie the Pooh book (ahem), skip this section because it won't mean a lot to you. Every debate about a new wave or ripple features the following characters: Tigger, the bouncing, ever-excitable tiger, who thinks everything new is simply marvelous and exciting. Eeyore, the old gray donkey, who thinks that Tigger, constantly running around and getting excited about new technology, is just, well, ridiculous. Piglet, who is scared of anything new and big. Rabbit, who does not mind anything as long as he can organize it. Pooh, the self-described "Bear Of Very Little Brain." The Wisdom of Pooh is to just humbly ask questions. Most entrepreneurs are Tiggers. You need that energy and enthusiasm to start a venture. But being more like Pooh and even listening to Eeyore on occasion is useful. They are smart, and you will encounter a lot of them in the market, so you need to understand how they think. And sometimes Eeyore is right and will save you the embarrassment of plunking your surfboard on a ripple! Rabbit is no good in the conceptual phase, but you will really need him when you reach the grind-it-out execution phase. As for poor little Piglet, just be his friend, all right? Take the Time to Listen to Odd Messengers Around 1992, I recall speaking to a rather eccentric network engineer who was getting all excited about this "Internet" thing. I was not ready to listen because I considered him a bit, shall we say, flaky. And of course, I was super-busy and the Internet was a distraction. The next big undiscovered wave is right in front of your nose, right now. Do you see it? There are two remedies for this: Don't work so hard all the time that you cannot recognize the next big opportunity when it walks through your door. A wise man who ran a big operation would tell his managers to take more time off work to avoid this problem. There are times when you have to sprint, to give it absolutely everything you've got. But you cannot sprint all the time. Try to separate the message from the messenger. This requires cultivating good listening skills, which takes time and effort. But also very useful is operating on the assumption that everybody has something interesting to say; you just need to guide the conversation until you find it. Can You Create Your Own Wave? No. It's a tempting thought. The old Valley wisdom is, "You forecast the future by inventing it." But nobody invents waves. They exist independent of any venture. You can only invent a product or service that rides a wave. For example, you can invent a better way to deliver online video, but you cannot invent the online video wave itself. Timing Is Everything Timing is everything. You need to catch the right wave at the right time and know when to get off. In the summer of 2001, I was sitting in Silicon Valley with three entrepreneurs, all originally from India. All of them spotted the Internet tsunami and had started ventures in response to it. The results were very different. Timing was the factor that separated the one winner from the other two. The first guy started a company, got capital, and launched a product just as demand was falling off a cliff. The venture folded. He desperately searched for other work, was running out of savings, and was planning to return to India, where the joke was that B2C meant "Back to Chennai" and B2B meant "Back to Bangalore." The second guy did all the same things but caught the wave a bit earlier and sold his venture for stock to a company that then went public. He saw the paper value of his stock turn into fortunes. However, the lock-up period prevented him from selling. By the time he was able to sell, the bubble had burst, and he got only a few hundred thousand dollars in cash. But he was older, wiser, and ready to jump back in the game. The third guy got it totally right. He sold out in time to get a few million dollars off the table. We were sitting in his beautiful home in one of the best areas of San Francisco. He was spending a lot of quality time with his young family. The third guy was the first to tell us that luck made all the difference. He was too modest. There is such a thing as smart luck. The lucky bit is being in the right place at the right time. Seeing the Internet tsunami early on does little good if you live in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Nor does being in Silicon Valley do much good if the bubble is bursting. You need both the right place and the right time. Which is why you need to understand the difference between secular and cyclical trends. The next post/chapter is about cyclical trends, which are very different from secular trends. But confusing them is easy to do. Image credit: colmsurf on Flickr. Discuss

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Google.org has just announced an international roster of partners for their PowerMeter gadget. PowerMeter is "a Google gadget that can show consumers their personal electricity consumption right on a home computer," according to today's announcement on the Google Blog. "Our software relies on 'smart meters' (or other metering devices) as a data source. Over the past several months we've been looking to partner with utilities that are installing (or have already installed) this equipment in their customers' homes. We're energized by our very first Google PowerMeter partners." Sponsor So far, partners include San Diego Gas & Electric (California), TXU Energy (Texas), JEA (Florida), Reliance Energy (India), Wisconsin Public Service Corporation (Wisconsin), White River Valley Electric Cooperative (Missouri), Toronto Hydro-Electric System Limited (Canada), and Glasgow EPB (Kentucky). Together, these utilities serve many millions of customers. PowerMeter allows consumers to track their energy consumption in real time (or very nearly real time) on their personal computers. It relies on data from utilities that use smart meter technology. Collectively, "smart grid" tech makes up one of the fastest-growing sectors of green tech and is being promoted by many as a way of addressing energy independence and climate change issues. Again, from the Google PowerMeter page, "We think Google PowerMeter offers more useful and actionable feedback than complicated monthly paper bills that provide little detail on consumption or how to save energy. But Google PowerMeter is just a start; it will take a lot of different groups working together to create what the world really needs: a path to smarter power." Discuss

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Business cards are a horror show. When it gets to the point that you have to either resort to a die-cut, motion-sentitive, titanium-plated laser show of a card or get your contact info embossed on beef jerky to avoid being forgotten in the trash heap of useless swag and Clif Bar crumbs at the bottom of some biz dev guy's carryon, we think it's safe to admit that the whole business card milieu needs an attitude adjustment. Here are a few cool, tech-forward tools to ensure neither you nor your contact details are lost in the shuffle. Sponsor Now, there are a handful of iPhone apps for accomplishing the simultaneous, mutual relay of contact information between two parties; however, the tools we'll cover today are for the wider audience of people who are not rabid Mac fanboys and girls. First, let's turn our attention to the MyNameIsE Connector, a nifty device that first came to our attention in this promotional video: The Connectors work out of the box. Users touch the devices together to exchange information and download contacts later through a USB port. It's ridiculously simple. The Connector will be available for conferences and festivals, and the MyNameIsE tech is also available via a mobile site and several native apps. A disturbingly similar device is the MingleStick. Forgoing any juvenile remarks about the product name, we observe the point-click-download process is, indeed, the perfect solution for conferences and shows; you can check out the 'Sticks in action at a trade show in this video. Don't they make a lovely addition to those chic lanyards we all know and love? However, this particular product is likely to remain a conference-bound toy for a while. Although the web-based MingleManager service offers a nice array of address book/calendar/content sharing functions, there is no mobile functionality aside from the MingleSticks themselves. Moving away from hardware, let's have a look at Dropcard. At this website, users can create free profiles with contact information, including websites and social networks. Upon meeting someone the user wants to keep in touch with, he texts the other person's email to 77950. The new contact is then sent the Dropcard user's profile information in an email and can save the information immediately to their address book. The best feature here is that it involves no effort on the new contact's part; he or she doesn't even need to have a phone handy. Think of it as good spam. Two other SMS-based services are TextID and Contxts. The latter has been particularly in vogue at recent tech conferences. However, both services require the non-user (or new contact, if you will) to take action by texting a word (usually a username or similar identifier selected by the user) to an SMS shortcode. Contxt is a free service for sharing up to 140 characters, while TextID monthly plans range from $19.95 $79.95 and allow for sending just about any kind of information, including mobile websites, pictures, maps/directions, or brochures or menus. As with any technological roundup, we're sure this post omits several wonderful products we didn't find; feel free to let us know about them in the comments. And for the love of Mike, stop wasting trees and lining the bottom of that biz dev guy's carryon: Just say no to business cards. Discuss

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During Digg's Townhall (embedded below) this evening, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced that the shout feature on Digg will be removed later this week to be replaced with a new share option that will "streamline your ability to share on Facebook and Twitter." According to an e-mail from Digg tonight, it will likely happen Thursday. "We've elected to remove shouts in favor of more popular sharing options, based on user feedback and broader market research," a Digg spokesperson told us. The new share feature will also include an e-mail option. Sponsor "Right now Digg is really focused on these product updates, you saw some of the things we've released recently [Facebook Connect, Diggbar, search], we really want to move Digg into more of a real-time environment." Adelson said during the Townhall. Dupe detection, which has been promised to Digg users at about six previous Townhalls, is also on the way, according to Adelson "in just a few days." The shout feature on Digg has been the bane of many a Digg user for some time. While originally created to encourage user interaction, it quickly became a hot tool for spammers. Additionally, many folk, including Mariana Peyton, who put the question "When will you resolve/shut down the shout feature and finally solve the power user issue?" to Adelson and Rose tonight, felt it was a tool used by power users to stake their claim on the site and get their submissions to the front page quicker. While Digg has yet to activate the new share feature, Muhammad Saleem, social media strategist and an active community member on Digg, tonight told ReadWriteWeb he can understand why Digg would want to remove the shout feature. "It's become a way of spamming stories to hundreds of people to amass votes and promote junk," he explained, "so I am definitely in favor of the removal as long as a new, better feature takes its place. Unfortunately, he doesn't think that a Twitter-share or Facebook-share option would be a better alternative - or even a good replacement for shouts. The Problem with Shouts Saleem explained that Digg instituted shouts as a way for people to share stories with each other, assuming (or hoping) that people would share a story or two now and again with 10-12 of their close friends "like Kevin would send stuff to the Digg team, I would shout something to The Drill Down team, etc." The problem of course was that the feature opened the door to a huge spam fest. People started amassing friends by the hundreds, and then shouting their stories to them in an effort to get the Diggs necessary to get to the front page. Most Diggers would tell you that once Digg realized how the system was being abused, they started limiting the feature, or minimizing the impact of the feature by requiring more Diggs (diversity) for stories that were getting votes as a result of shouts. "Now," according to Saleem, "they need a better mechanism that still enables people to share things without being penalized, and at the same time they need a system that doesn't get abused." Because the system can still be abused. According to Reg Saddler, a.k.a Zaibatsu, power users don't use shout. "Shout is superfluous on Digg. You use it to help out others, but you don't really need it to get the word out about your stories." Saddler, once a power user on Digg, is now making a name for himself on Twitter. According to Twitalyzer, Saddler's 'clout' value stands at 100%. "On Twitter, I can send a tweet out every single hour to my 83K followers and drive traffic to Digg," Saddler pointed out, "If you are a power user and you have a fan base on Twitter, you don't need the shout feature on Digg." This is not to say he spams his audience with worthless content; quite the opposite, Saddler has a keen eye for breaking news and is happy to share interesting stories with his online friends; Twitter just allows him to do it in real time. So what's the answer? Whether Digg offers its users shouts, Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail, they'll likely be faced with many of the same issues. According to Saleem, the only option that could work is for Digg to come up with more ground rules, but even that is a tall order. "They are leaders in the space, meaning they face issues many others don't face because they're not at the same level; the solutions they need are to problems that haven't existed before for other companies." So what do you think? Good move on Digg's part or do you have a better solution in mind? We'd love your thoughts.

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