Plenty…  A bit of news in the headlines recently about underwater cables being cut which led me to wonder just how many of these things are there?  I got my answer via WallStreetFighter and thought I would share (image from the UK’s Telegraph).

Here’s Google’s official response to a Microsoft/Yahoo combination.  This is gonna be good as Google is taking the side of the "principles of the Internet:  openness and innovation."  I’ll let the irony of that argument hang on its own considering the players in this dance. 

It’s predicted to get harder to sell IT this year…which is better than impossible I suppose.  According to this NY Times article and research from IDC:

"Overall growth in technology spending may fall from 7 percent last year to 4 percent or less this year"

The backdrop on this is that it’s not like spending has been going bonkers over the past 5 years especially in enterprise software and more specifically B2B investments.  I had a recent chat with the head of e-business at a large distribution company where he lamented the continued "hangover" from the tech bubble and the empty promises (and bad investments) from so much vaporware.

Improved access and more economically tolerable consumption models (SaaS/on-demand) make this a less difficult (but not easy) road.  Hubspan (yes, a shameless plug but our strategy is relevant to my point) is approaching this with a blend of self-service and managed service capabilities.  As budgets tighten further, companies will seek more economical ways to address the B2B agenda be that through outsourcing B2B projects completely or choosing to take on initiatives with a more attractive on-demand consumption approach versus the big dollars historically required for integration software, servers, and staff.

Good post by Chip Hazard of IDG Ventures (via PE Hub) on the opportunity in enterprise IT for young (and resilient) companies.  Lots of greats points here including the need to include software as a service  (SaaS) approaches and open source considerations.

Although I took a vacation day today, we stuck pretty close to home except for a journey over to the University Village Apple store where we bought a MacBook. 

The earth is not spinning backwards and dogs and cats are not living together so all seems right with the world even though this is our first foray into Apple land.  Early feedback is really positive.  We needed something for home to do pictures, movies, music, internet on and, quite frankly, after spending a few too many confusing cycles on the Dell configuration site (as well as feedback from trusted techie friends) we took the Mac plunge.

Also got to hand it to the marketing folks in Cupertino for the experience..not just a retail presence but a "place" to spend time.

Civil competition?  Or maybe "frenemies" as Microsoft and Cisco are moving more and more into each others respective spaces (software and networking) under the banner of unified communications.  Today’s announcement "Cisco, Microsoft says competing products to mesh" looks to set the tone for this continuing battle/love affair.

I added something new to Reply to All from a company called madKast.  Check out the "Share" icon next to each entry title.  Click on it and you can share it or tag it in a variety of ways – a nice all in one way to keep up with all the various places it could go..  They are working hard in Boulder at TechStars and I received a nice note from Josh Larson (one of the founders) about trying it out. 

This post from November of last year by Paul Kedrosky seems especially prescient in light of recent announcements about Google Gears enabling off-line usage of Reader (for starts) and now RealNetworks making an "offline" capability announcement.  Here’s Robert Scoble’s take on that.

I worked with a really bright software architect a while ago named Philip who once told me that computing runs in cycles – everything centralizes, then decentralizes, then centralizes, and so on.  Mainframes (centralize), client/server (decentralize), internet (centralize).  Now here we are with decentralization back to the client. 

The International Herald Tribune covers this continuing story in some depth here.  Continues to build on my previous post on the implications of this type warfare on connected societies.  Regardless of origin, looks like there are some good lessons to be learned on how the Estonian government was able to respond and endure these attacks.

This is a great video to understand what RSS does from a local Seattle company Common Craft .  Breaks how RSS works and how to get set up down to its basics.  I love the visual and simple approach that takes something that could be viewed as difficult and makes it mickey mouse easy.

Click To Play