1. Personal income outpaced inflation by 8% during the 90s.
2. Personal income rose by 40% on average over the decade.
3. The percentage of Americans with a Bachelors degree rose to 24.4% from 20.3%.
4. The percentage of households earning more than $150k a year tripled to 4.6%.
5. The number of those over 65 living in poverty dropped by 20%.

This is great news across the board.   It is little wonder why consumers were able to power us through the last recession -- we are much wealthier.  I expect this next decade to be even better. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:49:56 PM    comment   

So, for example, I could be a sales manager at a Fortune 500 company.  I want to track information available to me from multiple corporate applications, and I don't want to run the client software for each app on my desktop.  I only want the data.  So, in order to offer employees better access to data, the IT department is convinced to spend a couple of days to create granular RSS feeds for the main corporate apps (CRM, ERP, financial, etc.).  Here is what the feed could look like:

Sale:  Customer name:  Proctor and Gamble,  Date:  June 12, 2002, Amount:  $2.3 m,  Made by:  Tom Durst, E-mail: tdurst@widget.com, K-Log:  http://tdurst.widget.com ,  Product: Widget XYZ

Using Radio I merely subscribe to the feeds I want to monitor form a list on the Intranet (using the news subscription page).  Every hour I get all the latest data from each of the apps.  Further, I can take any of this data, add an annotation/comment/POV, and publish it to my K-Log.  Sweet.  I could also create published views of this data using the Multi-author tool for Radio (this tool lets me select the feeds I want to group and publish them to category specific weblog). 

Manila works in a similar fashion.  I can publish feeds I want to subscribe to using a simple macro.  Using Manila, create a new page for your site (a story), place the macro below in the "source view" of the editing box.  Here is the macro:

{viewRssBox
("http://www.nanotechnews.com/nano/rdf",
boxTitle:"Nanotech News", align:"center", width:200,
frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#ADD8E6",
titleBarColor:"#FFFFFF", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST",
hspace:0, vspace:0, maxItems:20)}

Note:  replace the URL for the RSS feed I have in the above with the feed you want to monitor, change the name, and presto.  You now have a page on your site with the data from the RSS feed.  In fact, using Manila you could build a complete portal of aggregated newsfeeds without much technical knowledge.

If I was really motivated, I could use Radio's outliner to build a directory of aggregated feeds.

Digital dashboards should be something anybody can create, customize, and control.  Don't let your IT department launch into a multi-million $$ universal application portal when a simple approach like this could be accomplished in days for short dollars. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:46:57 PM    comment   

>>>Knowledge management has been, up to now, largely a top-down enterprise. Driven by a concern that corporate knowledge repositories would quickly fill up with inaccurate, useless junk without rigid quality review, organizations have created small priesthoods of knowledge administrators responsible for virtually all authoring. Unfortunately, the result often has been massive bottlenecks as content generated in this centralized way sits for weeks or months awaiting review. By the time knowledge reaches its intended users, much of it has aged to the point of irrelevance.

Top-down knowledge management has had limited success. KM will begin to show significant ROIs when the process is inverted. Centralized knowledge administration clearly produces higher-value knowledge -- but centralized authoring retards growth. In the coming decade, the hard dollar value of knowledge will be recognized, and everyone -- not just a small elite -- will be responsible for generating the raw materials for corporate KM.

Bottom-up knowledge generation will have significant impacts on the way work, and workers, are perceived by corporations. Management will have to develop new incentives for knowledge workers to contribute high-quality content. For more traditional firms now adopting KM practices, decentralization of knowledge generation will be difficult, as it is antithetical to some ingrained management principles and habits.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:46:03 PM    comment   

Here are the stats on the jobless rebound in the early 90's:  

>>>A jobless recovery took place back then as the unemployment rate climbed long after the recession was over. Specifically, the jobless level was at 6.8% in March, 1991, when the recession officially ended and the cyclical upturn began. Unemployment dipped to 6.7% in April but then climbed to a peak of 7.8% in June, 1992. The rate didn't drop below 6.7% until November, 1993 -- nearly three years after the expansion started.<<<

This is what scares most people about the new economy (more than a flat market):

>>>Of course, there's the nagging fear that efficient machinery makes labor redundant in today's economy. Corporate America has invested enormous sums in sophisticated high-tech gear. Management also has demonstrated a ruthless drive to work remaining employees hard. Restructuring, reengineering, downsizing -- pick your favorite buzzword -- they're all permanent parts of management's toolkit. Still, in the second half of the 1990s, productivity ran at its highest level since the 1960s, and the unemployment rate dropped to its lowest level since John F. Kennedy was President.<<< 

A productive economy doesn't obliterate the need for labor.  In fact it does the opposite.  Three reasons: 

1) Countries with productive workers sell more products and services.   Costs per unit decline, which enables price cuts that spur demand (the magic of a demand curve).   Lower prices enhance global competitiveness.  Greater sales increases the demand for labor. 

2) Productive workers are paid more.  Higher pay begets greater demand for a wide range of goods and services (many of which fall outside of the budgets for many Americans).  In China, greater pay is helping a vast "bulge" of workers pass the threshold necessary to buy TVs and appliances.  In the US, our bulge is moving into personal services, advanced education, and better medical care (all labor intensive industries that require local workers to deliver).

3) Productivity is a mind-set that spreads like a virus locally.  This mind-set is a combination of discipline, training, and experience.  It's about how to apply technology correctly, hire and train workers effectively, and restrain costs wisely (you can't learn it in school -- you have to live it).  Productivity begets productivity across industries as workers shift and flow and information is exchanged.  A pool of productive workers makes it easier to start new companies and influences the decisions by existing companies as to where they should base their operations. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
6:41:36 PM    comment   

1. Graphics processors are chewing up cycles faster than the flatlined PC CPU.  Usage equals demand.  Control of the interface is extremely important.
2. The parallel architecture of graphics processors allow it to boost price performance at a 2 to 1 rate over PC CPUs.  A doubling rate of 6 vs. 18 months.  Nvidia's chips have twice the number of transistors the Pentium 4 has.
3. There is going to be convergence between the graphics used to create movies and games.  This is going to be huge.  Imagine if the Star Wars game looked as good as the movie -- the sales would be huge.
4. Nvidia will likely acquire AMD to add CPU functionality as a side feature of its chips (to move beyond their joint venture).  That means over time the price of a multimedia PC using an AMD/Nvidia combined chip could be 30% lower than an Intel powered model.
5. Microsoft is likely to create a home server that is tightly integrated (following on the heals of the Xbox's second generation).  An AMD/Nvidia chip could be central to that new box.  It's also likely that the brand of the chip used will be subsumed into the general conumer electronics style marketing that this new home server will use.  That loss of branding will hurt Intel.

5:26:30 PM    comment   

A well-known axiom of technology states that every 18 to 24 months, advancements produce computers that process information twice as quickly as their speediest predecessors. At some point, however, limiting factors such as space on a silicon chip and heat generated by intense electrical activity will prevent further computational acceleration. Luckily, researchers working in the field of nanotechnology have been investigating another way to transmit information through the hardware of a computer: atoms. If these fundamental building blocks could themselves act as transistors to control the flow of electricity, many more circuits could be integrated on a silicon chip, resulting in exponential increases in computing speed. To that end, new findings show that creating such single-molecule transistors is indeed possible.
3:58:16 PM    comment   

Until lately, it appeared certain that commercial and investment banks were converging to form universal banks. Yet big commercial players such as Fleet have recently stepped back from that course. Are commercial and investment banking really as complementary as many had supposed? This article argues that such a convergence is more a short-term fad than a long-term winning strategy.
3:58:06 PM    comment   

Back when venture capital was at its peak, big companies rushed to emulate the VC model through "corporate venturing," in which new-venture units create businesses within the corporation itself. How well are these units performing? The answer may surprise you.
3:57:58 PM    comment   

On-line entertainment sites stand to benefit most as broadband diffuses, but increased usage won't save their ailing ad-based business models. For on-line entertainment--indeed, for the Internet media sector as a whole--the implications are clear: forget about supporting your sites with advertising.
3:57:48 PM    comment   

It's time for Cingular's final exam. The nation's second-largest wireless company, with 21.6 million customers to Verizon's 29.4 million, has spent the 18 months since its creation building a brand, integrating its back offices and figuring out what to do with its two clashing wireless technologies.
3:57:41 PM    comment   

Advertisements hyping the future of the wireless lifestyle are ubiquitous. Cellular carriers often tout visions of consumers using their mobile phones to do anything from anywhere at warp speed, using so-called third generation (3G) wireless technology. But is 3G the communocopia it is made out to be? Some experts at Wharton and elsewhere believe it could be a waste of money for governments, carriers, consumers and applications developers alike.
3:57:10 PM    comment