[via Anish] Excerpts from an interview of Cisco's John Chambers by USA Today:

The great leaders of the future will absolutely know technology. Not from a geeky perspective, but from a practical business approach.
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I'm talking about developing the strategy, recruiting and developing the people to implement strategy, developing the culture and communicating all of the above. Those are the four things a CEO does.
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The point I'm making is that what gets an executive into technology is not a love for the technology. That's the exception. It's understanding what technology can do to achieve personal or business goals. Any CEO who is goodwill grasp what technology can do to enable their business strategy, achieve their productivity goals, their cost savings, enable their movement into new markets. They'll absolutely use it.

MocoNews writes about a Forrester report:

When it comes to mobile services, Japan is still ahead of Europe by a whopping five years, even though operators in both regions introduced mobile Internet services at roughly the same time in the late 1990s. That’s the view of Forrester, which has found 52 percent of Japanese users regularly surf the mobile Web, compared to only 10 percent of European users. Forrester analyst and author of the report, Niek van Veen told Mobile Business European users are happy with SMS and need to be encouraged to use more sophisticated mobile data services. Indeed, 39 percent of European mobile users who have never used any mobile internet services don’t see any value in using them.

But operators can only wean users off simple services that work out-of-the-box if they make their other data services no-brainers.

Web Worker Daily reviews web-based mobile aggregators. "The bottom line: If it were possible to take the full browser version of Google Reader and sync it with the mobile HTML version of Bloglines, I would be a very happy camper. That said, I have to give the edge to Google Reader for the best all-around cross-platform browser feed reading experience."

Business Week writes:

Having helped design the plumbing that carries hundreds of millions of blog posts, songs, and video clips each day, Hossein Eslambolchi is about to launch one of the Web's more intriguing technology forays. His goal? Making sense of all those bits. On Mar. 13, Eslambolchi's 10-person start-up, Divvio Inc., [launched] a service that automatically finds audio, video, and, eventually, text, on your favorite subjects. Then it weaves these clips together to create personalized multimedia channels that are updated each time you sign on. A channel on the New York Yankees might start with spring training highlights, followed by videotaped interviews and blog postings.
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First, Divvio's software trawls the Web, indexing content not just by subject or title, but by bandwidth, duration, and over a dozen other attributes. Then a "personalization engine" matches each consumer's desires to this data base--sensing, based on past requests, that the user is interested in Madonna the singer, not the mother of Christ. Finally, Eslambolchi says, the Divvio servers will stitch the segments together in milliseconds, regardless of what media format they were coded in.

Peter Rip writes:

Many of us in the VC community have been quietly wondering about the state of Web 2.0 innovation. We aren’t seeing much. Startup activity remains strong, but the consumer web landscape seems to be populated with the same bodies with different skins. Another video deal here; another social networking deal there, and social [feature] everywhere.
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The next wave of innovation isn't going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn't exist today.

The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today. Ask anyone who uses a SaaS application.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of Ram Charan’s book “Know-How”:

Certainly intelligence, self-confidence, presence, the ability to communicate, and having a vision are important. But being highly intelligent doesn’t mean that a person has the knack for making good business judgments. How many times have you seen people confidently making decisions that turn out to be disastrous? How often have you heard a vision that turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric and hot air?

Personal attributes are just one small slice of the leadership pie, and their value is greatly diminished without know-how, the eight interrelated skills that bring leadership into the realm of profit and loss.

We need leaders who know what they are doing. Change is always with us, but its current magnitude, speed, and depth is unlike what most readers of this book have experienced in their lifetime. A Google can come from nowhere and grow into a multibillion-dollar business in a few short years, becoming one of the world’s most highly valued companies.
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World-class competitors can now emerge from anywhere–witness the wave of emerging nation players that have clear advantages in their industries–thanks to mobility of talent, capital, and knowledge. You will be constantly tested for your know-how and lead your business in the right direction. Will you be able to do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave your business and the people in it better off than they were before?
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Instead of trying to define and adopt the ideal set of personal traits, it’s more useful to focus on a simple question: How does your personal psychology and cognitive ability affect the way you cultivate and use the know-hows? For example, the know-how of detecting the patterns of external change might be affected by your ability to connect the dots and whether at heart you are an optimist or pessimist.