The death of the home phone?

San Francisco Chronicle
Remember when cellphones were a luxury and everyone had a land line? Not anymore. ‘‘Today, the cellphone is regarded as a necessity by a growing number of Americans — especially the young and the poor — while the residential phone is becoming optional.’’ A survey finds 29 percent of ages 25 to 29 and 25 percent of those 18 to 24 have abandoned residential phones and rely solely on cellphones. Holdouts tend to be older, have families, and own homes. We ‘‘could be 30 to 50 percent wireless-only in several years, mirroring present patterns in Europe.’’

BoomTown
Ad network mania
Last week, when Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, it paid 10 times more than aQuantive's revenue and close to 50 times its cash flow. No matter how Web 1.0 bubble that seems, buying ad technology and networks is what the big Web players are doing. Web advertising has nowhere to go but up. Kara Swisher says aQuantitive is Microsoft's answer to Google's recent $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick: "Anything you can do, I can do with a bigger bag of money."

PC Magazine
All Things Digital
All Things Digital is a new technology news site, but its writers are high-profile veterans. The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, "the pope of the tech press," is a headliner, and so is the Journal's Kara Swisher. PC magazine says the site is "aiming to create a tech version of The Huffington Post."

Business 2.0
7 billion channels
Om Malik observes that "humans have an overwhelming need to get together, talk, communicate, and interact . . . as we rush toward an always-on, ever more connected society, we want to mimic these offline interactions on the Net." If Twitter is for broadcasting text in real time, a new service, Kyte, is for broadcasting photos and videos you take with your phone. Upload them to your own channel and friends and family can tune in to your life.

Marketing Daily
SUV divorce rate up
JD Power & Associates says consumers who are trading in large and mid-size trucks and SUVs are getting smaller vehicles instead. This year, "small vehicles as a percentage of total new-vehicle sales have risen from 26.3 percent in 2004 to 31.8 percent." JD Power says loyalty to SUVs tracks the price of gas, now averaging over $3 a gallon nationally. How many of these SUV owners have received a ticket from Cambridge-based Earth on Empty? It looks like a parking ticket, but it's a citation for having a gas guzzler.

PSFK
The babymoon
The travel and tourism industry is "carving out increasingly customized packages to target different life stages." The latest travel package on the rise is the "babymoon," targeting couples that are soon expecting a child. "Dozens of travel companies are offering weekends of pampering, shopping trips for baby-clothes and couples-massages." Once Junior arrives, life as you know it is over.

O'Reilly Radar
Watch the world go by
Flickrvision, a new feature on the photo site Flickr, runs like a movie in real time of photos as they're uploaded. But the best part? It shows where the photos are located on a big Google map. Brady Forrest says "it's hypnotic to watch." I'll say. The idea is just like Twittervision, which shows real-time Twitter posts on a map.

Work in Progress
Why we hate meetings
Opinion Research USA has a "new monthly study examining tolerance thresholds" in professional and personal scenarios. Tolerance is an interesting word choice. You need a lot of it in meetings. According to their research, the top reasons we hate meetings are disorganization and rambling. Next-most-hated things are "People who interrupt peers and try to dominate the meeting," and cellphone interruptions. Other issues? No bathroom breaks, no food. I'm getting worn out just writing about it.