Jinn of Quality and Risk

BBC News | Technology summarizes broadband in South Korea: 2Mb/s broadband costs $25 per month, and 8Mb/s $33. I'm paying about $40 per month for pseudo-braodband (512kb/s) in London, UK. At 8Mb/s it becomes possible to watch DVD-quality movies over the Internet. South Korea is now 4-5 years ahead of the UK in terms of technology adoption, and the gap is likely to be increasing. Note: in the 1960s, South Korea was poorer than the average Arab country. Liberty and free markets make a lot of difference, very quickly. 

Fortune: Because media companies see intellectual property as their only asset, they're willing to risk totally alienating their entire customer base in order to protect that asset. A recent KPMG report makes mostly the same points...

The music industry as we've known it in the 20th century is going to be replaced by another type of industry, much more art- and customer-orientated. Thanks to new technology. The closest analogy for this revolution would be how the horse industry was replaced by the auto industry, both enabling transportation but in radically different ways. The gentle American suburb lifestyle would not exist without cars, nor would supermarkets, massive tourism, skyscrapers, airports, etc. In a similar way, the way we access and appreciate the arts will change, and will impact multiple other areas of our lives. We don't know what the exact consequences will be, but we know it will be very good. 

BBC News | Business: Mobile phone operators are being too optimistic over the popularity of new third-generation, or 3G, technology according to research group Forrester. The company suggests that unrealistic expectations from 3G licence holders means they will have to triple their user numbers to break even within the next five years. I've recently bought the Ericsson T68 and have absolutely no intention of buying a 3G handset in the next 3 years. I still don't use WAP either, although it's now an unavoidable "function" of all new phones (waste of money and technology, that's what it is!). 

In the short run, the market's a voting machine, and sometimes people vote very unintelligently. In the long run, it's a weighing machine, and the weight of business and how it does is what affects values over time. — Warren Buffett, recently paraphrasing his mentor, the late Benjamin Graham [via Capitalism Magazine]