The Boston Globe writes:

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

The proposal is certain to provoke a major fight with Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc., and Microsoft Corp., the powerful owners of popular Internet sites. The companies fear such a move would give telecommunications companies too much control over a fast-growing part of the Internet.

The battle is largely over video services. Several major telecom companies are working on ways to deliver broadcast-quality television over the Internet. Currently, online video can be slow to download and choppy to watch, even with higher-speed Internet services.

The proposal supported by AT&T and BellSouth would allow telecommunications carriers to offer their own advanced Internet video services to their customers, while rival firms' online video offerings would be transmitted at lower speed and with poorer image quality.

Dion Hinchcliffe provides five reasons:

1. The Focus of Technology Moves To People With Web 2.0.
2. Web 2.0 Represents Best Practices.
3. Web 2.0 Has Excellent Feng Shui.
4. Quality Is Maximized, Waste Is Minimized.
5. Web 2.0 Has A Ballistic Trajectory.

iMedia Connection writes:

When it comes to mobile RSS, the advantage to marketers is the fact that mobile Internet users tend to be a captive audience. Users typically view content during their "downtime" -- while waiting in a doctor's office, on a subway or even during a break at work. The lack of competing distractions in these scenarios means this captive, yet active, audience usually interacts with their chosen content at a much higher rate than comparable media formats. n this open, relaxed frame of mind, customers are more receptive to the messages being communicated. Smart marketers know that by contacting prospects when and where they are most open to receiving marketing information, companies can realize unprecedented marketing and sell-through success.

As more mobile users turn to RSS to obtain information on the go, advertising within the feeds will be vital to the success of this new content model and will be a lucrative way to capture this growing, trendsetting audience. Also, publishers should keep in mind that by placing relevant advertisements in their mobile RSS feeds, similar to the content they would find on their website, users are more likely to be interested, and, in turn, more likely to clickthrough -- ultimately driving more traffic to the website directly.

Sramana Mitra has a post following the acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta by Cisco:

Only two companies had a complete lock over the channel serving the STB market: Motorola and Scientific Atlanta. With today’s acquisition, Cisco cuts through the barrier to enter the STB market, and with it, acquires a massive opportunity to lead the innovation in home networking. Neither Motorola, nor SA had enough of the other pieces. Cisco does.

Imagine the future of the Home Network ...

One, just One box from Cisco sits as a Gateway Server for ALL the home networks, with a fat pipe coming into it. Services can be turned on and off remotely, as the consumer pays. Various Clients - all Wireless, of course - plays off this Server: The VOIP/VideoOIP phone handset / headset / Camera, the TV, the PC, the Laptop, ...

This server is both a smart Set-Top-Box and a big storage device with PVR, DVD, DVR, Digital Music Console, Wireless Router.

Alan Moore writes:

Up until now, advertising has always relied on interruption.

Whether travelling to work, reading their favourite newspaper, watching TV or just generally going about their daily business, consumers are constantly interrupted by advertising messages.

But the power of these interruptive messages is waning, simply because there are so many of them around us and they cost so much to do.

More TV channels, more magazines, more billboards, more doordrops, more email spam means more and more ads - interruptive advertising is beginning to become as much of a headache for marketers as it is for the poor consumer.

The more interruptions there are, the more clutter there is - and consequently the less power any individual message has to stand out and get noticed.

Moreover there are grumblings from the client side that all is not well in the marketing communications industry.

No wonder that marketers are waking up to a new way to build their brands.

Not by Interruption, but by Engagement.

Engagement Marketing is about brands, becoming, for example part of the fabric of entertainment - enhancing it, not interrupting it.

Put simply, it is about getting out of the ad break and into the world of content, assets and properties.

8. Ray Ozzie’s Memo on Software-as-a-Service

One of the best analyses of the future of software came from the ‘leaked’ October memo by Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie, who has a great reputation in software circles following his hand in Lotus Notes and Groove. Ozzie’s vision for the future of software is being heralded as Microsoft’s vision. This is what Ray Ozzie wrote:

…The environment has changed yet again – this time around services. Computing and communications technologies have dramatically and progressively improved to enable the viability of a services-based model. The ubiquity of broadband and wireless networking has changed the nature of how people interact, and they’re increasingly drawn toward the simplicity of services and service-enabled software that ‘just works’. Businesses are increasingly considering what services-based economics of scale might do to help them reduce infrastructure costs or deploy solutions as-needed and on subscription basis…Most challenging and promising to our business, though, is that a new business model has emerged in the form of advertising-supported services and software.
…
Today there are three key tenets that are driving fundamental shifts in the landscape – all of which are related in some way to services. It’s key to embrace these tenets within the context of our products and services.

1. The power of the advertising-supported economic model.
Online advertising has emerged as a significant new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services. In some cases, it may be possible for one to obtain more revenue through the advertising model than through a traditional licensing model. Only in its earliest stages, no one yet knows the limits of what categories of hardware, software and services, in what markets, will ultimately be funded through this model. And no one yet knows how much of the world’s online advertising revenues should or will flow to large software and service providers, medium sized or tail providers, or even users themselves.

2. The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.
A grassroots technology adoption pattern has emerged on the internet largely in parallel to the classic methods of selling software to the enterprise. Products are now discovered through a combination of blogs, search keyword-based advertising, online product marketing and word-of-mouth. It’s now expected that anything discovered can be sampled and experienced through self-service exploration and download. This is true not just for consumer products: even enterprise products now more often than not enter an organization through the internet-based research and trial of a business unit that understands a product’s value.
…
3. The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that “just work”.
The PC has morphed into new form factors and new roles, and we increasingly have more than one in our lives – at work, at home, laptops, tablets, even in the living room. Cell phones have become ubiquitous. There are a myriad of handheld devices. Set-top boxes, PVRs and game consoles are changing what and how we watch television. Photos, music and voice communications are all rapidly going digital and being driven by software. Automobiles are on a path to become smart and connected. The emergence of the digital lifestyle that utilizes all these technologies is changing how we learn, play games, watch TV, communicate with friends and family, listen to music and share memories.

Adam Bosworth is one of the pioneers of XML. He is now VP-Engineering at Google. He wrote an article in the October issue of ACM Queue which discussed learnings from the Web. His key point was that “today databases violate essentially every lesson we have learned from the Web.” He called forth database vendors to “to support a native RSS 2.0/Atom protocol and wire format; a simple way to ask very general queries; a way to model data that encompasses trees and arbitrary graphs in ways that humans think about them; far more fluid schemas that don’t require complex joins to model variations on a theme about anything from products to people to places; and built-in linear scaling so that the database salespeople can tell their customers, in good conscience, for this class of queries you can scale arbitrarily with regard to throughput and extremely well even with regard to latency, as long as you limit yourself to the following types of queries.”

Tomorrow: The Power of Us