The attention economy - Thomas & Beck

In this book "The attention economy", authored by Thomas H Davenport and John C Beck.
A few interesting points they outline are

"DEFICIT PRINCIPLE: Before you can manage
attention, you need to understand just how
depleted this resource is for organizations and
individuals."

"BANKRUPTCY PRINCIPLE: If you run an attention deficit
too often or too long, there will eventually be serious psychological
and organizational consequences."

"MARKETS PRINCIPLE: As with any other scarce and valuable
resource, markets for attention exist both within and
outside an organization. As with other markets, some people
do a lot better than others in the attention markets."

Here are some more interesting bits:

"Rule Number One is to pay attention. Rule Number Two might be: attention is a limited
resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention."

"The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than in all the written material available to a reader in the .fteenth century."

"To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life.
Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience with them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, than on what happens to us."

" Because attention is one of those slippery intangible assets, it’s difficult to document its presence (though its absence is surely felt)."

"There is only so much attention to go around"

India's poor

Mr. Venkatesan, Chairman of Microsoft India recently wrote an article in the wall street journal - "Innovate for India's Poor" - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118470514352969321.html

He starts off by equating Moaists to the hundreds of millions of Indian villagers! He then dismisses the possibility of policy changes benefiting the poor. He disparages the indian political class. He goes on for a couple more paragraphs- cautioning the rich that the poor are going to steal your wealth! And he ends the article saying innovation by corporate's is the key!

Looks like he wrote the article to impress upon his bosses at Redmond.

We all know Microsoft is company which has spent millions of dollars to help people. But Mr Venkatesan needs to be more responsible while criticing indian policies and policy makers.

google + doubleclick

Google paid $1.65 billion for youtube last year. It now beat it's own previous record by paying $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. But the deal is subject to regulatory approvals.

The news now is antitrust defendents like Microsoft and AT&T are teaming up against
Google

http://news.com.com/On+antitrust%2C+is+Google+the+next+Microsoft/2100-1028_3-6198111.html?tag=st.num

Net neutrality

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9746172-7.html

Net neutrality is a proposed legislation in the US, this legislation is to prevent service providers from giving preferential routing. This is suported by the likes of Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com .., the content providers on the internet.

On the other hand the likes of AT&T, Verizon are against any such legislation. The telcom
equipment manufacturer are also against any such legislation. (As They profit when the service providers profit/pucrchase more equipment)

If there are no legislations and things carry on as they currently are - We could be seeing creation of dedicated services from the service providers (or the service providers partners).
We call them "dedicated services" since the IP packets for these services will be given a higher priority (Has the service provider owns the cables/infrastructure).

In such a scenario you could expect a video streaming application hosted by the service provider having a distinctly better quality than youtube or other similar services.

There is speculation that in such a scenario

• There could be a "natural" degradation of traffic originating from non-premium or rival sources.
• Service providers could "abuse" this to their benefit. For example AT&T and Yahoo have a long standing tie up. So if AT&T is allowed to build in priority routing in it's infrastructure, we could start seeing yahoo sites getting faster and google less responsive.
• If a content provider has to pay a premium for faster routing, he will be recovering the cost from the end user(us).
  

But the above is only a speculation!

Having a legislature in favour of net neutrality will be going against the historically open architecture of the internet! It will also give the FCC the power to legislate on what network arrangements are permitted and what not ...

I think we should let the internet chart its own course .., and not end up with protectionist legislation based on speculation.

The next big thing

"The next big thing is to organize, tag, and link information to a specific location"

Read the below article, pretty much summrizes the needs of the current internet user -

http://www.techconsumer.com/2007/07/16/the-next-big-thing-why-web-20-isnt-enough/

Patents

Kittu and I thought about a licensing model which will be based on usage. Which means the end user "subscribes" for an application and pays for the "time" he uses it. Only later I found this idea is already patented. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20030084145.html

Getting a patent requires $$$, take a look at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2007february01.htm

Take a look at the below posting, this company (InterDigital Communications) seems to be making most of its profits by lawsuits for patent infringements.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0705/gallery.fastgrowing_top25.biz2/4.html

Adwords, Adsense

Adwords and Adsense are ideas which were waiting to happen.
Both of these products help people making money. The target adience covers the entire internet userbase.

Google

I have been working my way through google since yesterday.

• I created a googlepage. I created my google bookmarks, and I have added a bookmark to it.
• I downloaded and setup the google toolbar on my dad's pc
• I set up igoogle - Another really interesting innovation by google. I included my bookmarks and a daily garfield cartoon on my google homepage. I do not intend to clutter it further, let's see.
• I read a little about google adwords, and it is an amazing concept!
• I have started my first blog ;), it took me atleast 2 minutes to finalize the name. Hmmm ...