Wired News: So Much for the Freelance Economy

Wired News: So Much for the Freelance Economy The trend suggests that predictions of an economy run by freelancers -- such as those made by Daniel Pink in his book Free Agent Nation, and by MIT's Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher in their 1998 paper, "The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy" -- were shortsighted.
In 2000, research firm EPIC/MRA of Lansing, Michigan, estimated that 41 percent of all Americans would be private contractors by 2010. But today, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that self-employment numbers have not grown at all over the past four years.

Amazon.com Web Services Announces Trio of Milestones - New Tool Kit, Enhanced Web Site and 25,000 Developers in the Program

Amazon.com Web Services Announces Trio of Milestones - New Tool Kit, Enhanced Web Site and 25,000 Developers in the Program "Software Development Kit 3.0 is our best offering to third-parties to date," said Colin Bryar, Amazon.com Director of Web Services and Associates. "We are confident that the rich features available in the new offering and the robust Web site for developers will allow developers to create innovative applications that leverage the Amazon.com platform for merchandising products."

The third party developer program and general web services model showing its usefulness across many markets - shopping, auctions, search, etc.

NapaNews.com | Being tech savvy part of life for Silicon Valley youth

NapaNews.com | Being tech savvy part of life for Silicon Valley youth Instant messaging rules the digital conversation landscape, the survey found. Two-thirds of those online use it, while 40 percent spend time in chat rooms or post to message boards.

The report, Where Next For Mobile Messaging? Driving revenues profitably and controlling cannibalisation, forecasts revenues growing from USD31 billion in 2002 (USD13 billion in Western Europe) to USD69 billion by 2007 (USD25 billion in Western Europe), provided that operators take immediate action to drive service growth and control cannibalisation of existing revenues. Total messaging volumes, comprising SMS, MMS and mobile instant messaging/email, are forecast to quadruple from 670 billion in 2002 (131 billion in Western Europe) to 2600 billion in 2007 (607 billion in Western Europe). (Charts available to journalists on request.)
...
"Buddy lists, presence information and integration with fixed network services make mobile instant messaging a potentially attractive service for many. Some mobile instant messaging and email services are being priced at a substantially lower level than SMS. There is a real risk of these services cannibalising existing revenues, and an even greater threat from third-party competitive services."

CMP Media

CMP Media The major enterprise telecommunications providers have also started getting their acts together to migrate their customers to the next generation of converged, IP-based enterprise multi-modal communications.
They have recognized that communicating with people is an enterprise "application", made up of hundreds of features and functions for both telephony call management and messaging. These capabilities are now becoming pure software, which means they will keep evolving forever.
With open standards of IP networking, the various communication servers can now interwork to support all forms of contact with human users, whether as calls or messages, whether in speech or text, and whether originating from people or automated application processes.

Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: The voice of the valley economy

Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: The voice of the valley economy "We decided to use instant messaging to enable our IT department to immediately notify all branch offices about Web site and network issues," Polsgrove said. "Through our research we found that e/pop met our computer security requirements, is completely customizable and leverages our network directory. We instantly know who is online and can blast out specialized macro messages that alert all employees to potential IT issues, which they will receive whether they are logged onto the system or not."

Forbes.com: Party Line

Forbes.com: Party Line One avid user is Teresa Lo. A day trader in Vancouver, B.C., with a large following, Lo pays $280 a month to rent a 200-person PalTalk room, and charges around 180 people $200 apiece each month for passwords that give them access to her room and trading techniques. "It's a great business for us," says Lo, 38.

Who says all the money is in porn? $36K/month - not too shabby for just letting people watch you work, sort of.

Email Uncool, IM Rulz Research from Penn State, noting the negative reaction to email use among 'third generation internet users' (i.e. teens), who strongly prefer IM for peer-group interaction. (The press release is not yet on the web, so I include the full text here.)

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A new generation of Internet users views email as a relic of the past, preferring instant messaging for communication with their peers, according to a Penn State researcher.

"For the first time, a standard, everyday tool like email is no longer being used by a specific youth culture," says Steven L. Thorne, associate director of the Center for Language Acquisition in Penn State?s College of the Liberal Arts.

These youths, roughly 18, 19 and 20 years old, are third-generation Internet users and to them, email is akin to getting dressed up for a job interview, an uncomfortable formality to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

"They use email to contact their employer or professors, or to ask their parents for money, but not for age-peer interaction," adds the Penn State researcher.

This observation came as a surprise to Thorne who, in a project funded by the U.S Department of Education, was exploring online communication as a means to help students learn French by connecting them with university students in Bretagne, France.

"I hoped to use the Internet to link people up, get them fired up about building friendships so they would be more invested in learning the language," says Thorne, who also is associate director, Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (NFLRC), in Penn State?s College of the Liberal Arts.

Thorne and his collaborators chose Net Meeting, a real-time conferencing program that allows users to exchange text and video messages from anywhere in the world. However, they worried that the time difference would limit the students? opportunities to interact. To avoid this problem, they also required participants to exchange a number of emails as part of their semester grade. Interestingly, some of the most compelling intercultural interactions occurred when students chose another Internet communication program, AOL?s Instant Messenger (IM). The students? reaction led Thorne in an unexpected direction.

"From my advanced age," the 41-year-old Thorne laughs, "because I am not part of this young IM generation, email does not seem an entirely objectionable choice. But objectionable it was."

While many students spent hours of IM time with their "keypals," most sent only the required number of emails. In one case, a Penn State woman opted not to send any, despite the negative effect on her grade and an apparent infatuation with her male French contact.

"It was obvious to me she had a crush on this French student, and so had even more motivation to reach out than just the grade," says Thorne. "There is pretty clear evidence in what the students did that they would not use email for peer relationship building."

In an article published in the May issue of the journal Language Learning & Technology, the Penn State researcher proposes that Internet communication tools are simply that -- tools -- and, as such, are subject to what he terms "cultures-of-use." In other words, while 40-year-olds might use email to plan an after-work get-together, third-generation Internet users would not dream of it.

"These are habituated IM users," explains Thorne. "They have been using the Internet to communicate with each other for five, six, seven years now and have developed specific preferences. In educational settings this is paramount. For example, as one of the designers of this project, I chose the wrong tool. How they use the Internet in everyday life outside of the university has everything to do with how teachers should use it in the classroom."

In a broader context, as these third-generation Internet users hit the job market, they will undoubtedly carry with them their cultures-of-use for Internet communication programs. Currently, IM is largely frowned upon at the office, but Thorne sees small pockets of users already beginning to transform the workplace.

For example, an undergraduate recently applied for a position with an employer located some distance from Penn State, he recalled. The company's recruiter herself had graduated from college recently as well and to save travel expenses, the two women decided to use IM to conduct the job interview. While that may be unthinkable to many, this is a generation that has grown up talking to each other while sitting in front of a computer.

Thorne says it is possible that IM may encroach further into territory currently reserved for email. "I can also see some other new technology coming along and supplanting IM. I wish we were better able to predict the future," he notes.

[via Corante: Social Software]

100 Million Customers and Counting: MSN Messenger Extends Worldwide Lead Among Instant Messaging Providers
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[via Reality Check]

 

As several would predict...once the engine is started not much can stop the bulldozer now!

Wired News: A TiVo Player for the Radio

Wired News: A TiVo Player for the Radio Several electronics makers are releasing new products that promise to do for radio what the TiVo digital video recorder has done for television.

I want 'pause' for radio...although recording wouldn't be bad either!

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Verizon battling on broadband

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Verizon battling on broadband Babbio said it costs Verizon about $5,000 per location to replace a pay phone with a WiFi ''node'' that fits inside the phone stand and to upgrade network connections to broadcast an 11-megabit-per-second Internet connection within about a 300-foot hot-spot range. Verizon will offer the service exclusively to its own DSL customers who get special access codes, hoping the perk of free WiFi will boost interest in DSL. Gowing acknowledged that ''it's just not completely secure. You probably don't want to be shopping online when you're sitting at the park'' in range of a WiFi transmitter and computer hackers who may be trying to ''sniff'' data from the air, Gowing said. ''It's good for e-mail and casual Web surfing, but if it's something intensely private and secret, you probably don't want to be doing it at a hot spot, whether it's one of ours or anyone else's.''

vnunet.com Comment: Corporate messaging will grow

vnunet.com Comment: Corporate messaging will grow The market for IM for corporates is currently fairly small in the UK, but analyst firm Yankee Group points out that there are 25 million business users in the US, and it predicts 150 percent compound annual growth through to 2005.

CRN: Daily Archives

CRN: Daily Archives The iMeeting component will offer full Web conferencing, white-board capabilities for marking up and editing documents online, voice/audio streaming, polling, annotation, the record and playback of meetings, and chat sessions, he said.
However, version 2.0 will lack the robust instant-messaging and presence-awareness features of Lotus SameTime and Microsoft's forthcoming Real-Time Communications Server 2003, but those capabilities will be offered in a future release, Levine said.

Motorola Woos Teens with IM Appliance

Motorola Woos Teens with IM Appliance What you get, essentially, is a basic level of AIM connectivity anywhere in the home. The client supports a handful of AIM emoticons, but does not support rich text. IMfree users appear as mobile users to others on AIM -- that is, with a small mobile phone icon next to their Buddy List name. There are a few glitches to work around -- if AOL is an IMfree user's ISP, then the IMfree user must log into the handheld with a different Screen Name than they used to sign onto PC.

WSJ, InfiniteAgent Launch News Bot

WSJ, InfiniteAgent Launch News Bot The bot, dubbed "WSJOnline" and available on America Online's (Quote, Company Info) AOL Instant Messenger network, gives current news headlines and summaries, and stock quotes, when users send it an IM. Users can navigate through menus to sort headlines by region or section, and can click on the summaries to open the stories on the WSJ.com site -- but only if a user is a paid subscriber to the site, that is.

Meet The Makers - Creative people in a technical world.

Meet The Makers - Creative people in a technical world.(an interview with Jeremy Allaire) Well, Web services are still the next big thing, among many others. Seems like a wide range of positive, reinforcing trends are creating an opportunity for a new Internet environment. A bunch of things that I’m tracking that seem very inter-related include:
Rich clients
Web services
Real-time communications
Broadband
Digital lifestyle devices
WiFi and wireless devices
Paid content
Blogsphere and syndication networks
Open source and outsourcing
So, combined, we’ve got a great new Internet to go out and build for!

Microsoft R&D efforts seek to bolster home networks

Microsoft R&D efforts seek to bolster home networks The company is developing with Philips, Onkyo and others content directory services for automatically discovering and interacting with PC-based media libraries on a home network. With Creative Labs and others, Microsoft is defining a new protocol for quickly synchronizing libraries over a USB 2.0 cable.

Designtechnica News - Motorola delivers solution for IM addicts

Designtechnica News - Motorola delivers solution for IM addicts About the size of a CD case, the IMfree handheld device is equipped with a large display and full QWERTY keyboard for IM addicts, providing a private IM experience away from the restraints of a stationary computer. Currently compatible with AOL® Instant Messenger™ and AIM Buddy Lists®, the new, easy-to-use Motorola IMfree system has all that chatting lovers need to take their IM experience almost anywhere in the home.

Websphere Adds Wireless Notifications, Messaging

Websphere Adds Wireless Notifications, Messaging IBM joins a number of smaller players -- including names like Critical Path, Vayusphere, and telecom giant Sprint, which is offering a solution in connection with UnBound Technologies -- in mobile, enterprise-focused alerting and notification. That's while consumer mobile alerting also is seeing interest from major names in wireless. Inphomatch, one of the big names in Short Messaging Service inter-carrier interoperability, earlier this year debuted a gateway service designed to route content and alerts from third-party sources to mobile phone users' devices.

Sleuthing Out Data - Emerging Technology - CIO Magazine May 1,2003

Sleuthing Out Data - Emerging Technology - CIO Magazine May 1,2003 Smart searching might very well become as important to the face of an enterprise as smart salespeople.

Interesting list of companies in the information categorization and finding market...