links for 2010-08-25

Based on per capita stats. Interesting classifications.

How do you use your information & is there scope to monetize it?

Chris Anderson's response to Malcolm Gladwell's review of his book "Free" in the New Yorker, in particular to the journalism business model point.
Bottom line is that you still gotta earn enough for your daily bread whatever your business model.

Quite a different take on free by Malcolm Gladwell with a bunch of examples, summed up thus: "The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws."
The thing is free has its costs (however miniscule per unit, can add up to enormous sums) that need to be offset in some way, and this is where your real business model lies. Freemium may not always be the answer – just look at what happened to Ning.

Pretty interesting way to analyse the fit of an innovation with a company's business model. The method goes beyond the basic core competency compatibility and looks at other parameters like geography, customers, channel & product\service. The author also predicts that Google is likely to trump Microsoft in the mobile space due to the better fit of the platform with its business model.

Glucose levels have an impact on one's willpower & it's recommended to start small to improve self control.

Download the original version of VisiCalc for the PC, provided by the inventor himself. The site also includes reference cards and lots of other resources, links & articles

A handy tool that can enables you to access your desktop media on your portable devices including iPhones. Best of all, it's free. Wonder whether it works with proxies.
Airvideo is a similar service for videos, but its free version has some restrictions.

A prototype news search tool from Yahoo! Research Barcelona that currently uses the NYT database & shows trends for the search term (including predictions for the future)
via http://www.technologyreview.in/computing/26113/

A dedicated marketplace for publishing professionals to find critical information and unique databases, find each other, and to do business better electronically

Not good at all. It goes on to show how dissimilar the dynamics of the mobile phone platform is to the PC. The members of the so called OHA seem to have locked up their contributions. So, is this a failure of open-source\free software?
Apple did make some inroads into freeing up the phone from the operator, but that's a different story. Also goes on to show how much better the Indian telecom market is than the US one (for the time being at least).