Going post-geographic
Do a torturous commute just to e-mail and phone clients in different time zones? With laptop, cellphone, and Internet in hand, increasingly we don’t. Welcome to the post-geographic workplace. Fifteen percent of the US urban workforce is ‘distributed.’’ By 2012, it will be 40 percent. Communities are transforming to suit the now-home workforce. Companies are saving on rent and gaining workers that are 15 percent more productive. The key in the global knowledge economy is to influence people beyond your line of sight. Get comfortable with it.
Online Media Daily
Digg going deep
Digg is a collaborative news site where readers submit stories and then decide which ones go on the home page. Digg plans to branch out from tech stories, moving into other news categories, as well as media such as video and audio. In October Digg closed on $2.8 million in venture capital. However, it was profitable before the capital came rolling in: The site was monetized entirely by Google AdSense dollars.
Wall Street Journal
The blog elite
Tech blogs were supposed to supplant big media with a grass-roots army of bloggers unafraid to speak truth to power. Well, meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. There are tons of tech blogs. But a tiny fraction of them matter. And those that do aren't part of a proletarian revolution, but the tech world's new elite. Watch the tech blog elite in action at tech.memeorandum.com, a minute-by-minute tracking service of hot tech blog topics.
Slate
iTunes meets Nasdaq
What's a digital music pricing system that will continue to pack the corporate coffers yet be fair to music lovers? A real-time commodities market with songs priced strictly on demand. The more downloads, the higher the price, the fewer, the lower the price. Record companies wouldn't need one album to sell 5 million copies. They could sell 500 copies of 10,000 different titles, or five copies of 1 million titles. Think Nasdaq. Think how it could change the way people get famous.
Wired
Organs on demand
Need a skin graft? A heart patch? Turn on your printer and spit one out. Researchers have developed bio-ink and Jello-like paper that creates tubes similar to blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells. A special three-dimensional printer prints one thin layer at a time. Then they stack the layers up, plop them in a ''bioreactor" for a week or so, and turn the strange brew into, um . . . guts. Look for this in real people in five to 10 years.
CNet
Another Salesforce?
Arena Solutions says product-lifecycle management is ripe for the software-as-service model. Manufacturers communicate complex product info to suppliers and use pricey software to manage it. Arena's hosted service makes it easier. It's delivered on-demand, so system improvements are instantly available, allowing manufacturers to focus on product innovation instead of installing upgrades or maintaining IT infrastructure.
Red Herring
Digital living room
Industry insiders at the iHollywood conference deemed the much-hyped digital living room not ready for primetime. The biggest problems connecting entertainment systems wirelessly? Shoddy home networking and a lack of common standards for device makers. One expert admitted that despite being an MIT grad and having led a division at Apple, he had to hire someone to install his home television.
