Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Yahoo! is big in Japan, and Microsoft is big everywhere. My editor at Shukan Daiyamondo asked me to put a piece together looking at why, and what it might mean.

Here’s what I filed.  Pre editing and whatever else might have happened — the story was changing a lot at that time, and more information might have added.  This was published in Japan the week of February 23rd — I’ve been swamped and not posting much here. MS tries to buy Yahoo

My latest New York Times column, Trying to put New Zip Into Moore’s Law,  suggests that it can, and looks at the commercial potential for self-assembling nanotechnology.

My latest Prototype column looks at speech recognition and its impending arrival in mass markets from cell phones to cars. See The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey.

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times, Capital Ideas and Social Goals, looks at what might be a heartwarming development: more efficient ways to fund social entrepreneurs.

It seems like a stupid question. After all, shouldn’t the digital world emulate the real world as closely as possible?

But the people I interviewed for a piece on the addition of 3D maps, Online Map Makers Gathering Data to Render 3-D Landscapes for Web Surfers, Mobile Phone Users didn’t have a lot of tangible reasons why digital maps needed to be in three dimensions. But one, Rich Gibson, pointed to future reasons why 3D might matter:

For now, he says that 3-D maps are just a baby step toward developing more useful maps. “It’s the scaffold, the framework upon which the things we do in life can rest,” he says. When 3-D will become really important is when sensor networks develop over time. That will make it possible to enhance 3-D maps with any variety of features, in real time.

Adam Penenberg has written a lovely piece in Fast Company, All Eyes on Apple, assessing whether Apple’s growth prospects match its lofty stock price. I have a small sidebar looking at Apple’s hardware, box by box.

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times looks at the slow process of innovation towards a mobile Web. See Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far.

I condensed a series of thoughtful articles on competition in American life from the Wilson Quarterly in my latest Big Think post, looking in particular at what kind of hires companies should seek (anxiety-prone chokers like me, for one).

Here’s the full post of A New View on Competition.

I posted recently on a series of excellent profiles on young innovators, published in Smithsonian magazine. In particular I cited its brilliant brief profile of managing Ramon Gonzalez, who four years ago started the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, a public middle school in New York’s South Bronx neighborhood. I also cited several of the unusual lessons one could learn from these innovators. See A Little Innovation Inspiration.

My new blog on BNet, The Big Think, kicks off with a post looking at the entrepreneur as missionary.

The theologian Juergen Moltmann wrote of the adventus (the ideal future) and the futurum (the expected future), and it made me think that every entrepreneur I’ve ever met, and plenty of managers at established business, has both an adventus and a futurum in mind.

For more, read Managing toward the ideal future.