Much like the tendrals, this was slightly dissappointing since I’d wanted to see double digits. The other interesting numbers…

• Mac up 9.63% to 9.93%
• iPhone almost half a percent, up 0.44% to 0.48%
• Linux down 0.85% to 0.83%, probably since there wasn’t much Linux activity over the holidays.
• Windows down 88.68% to 88.26% (though Windows 7 betas are picking up)

I described in December that Market Share for Apple would hit 9.5% at the end of December and break 10% in January. So far Apple exceeded expectations and reached 9.63% in December. That’s a 0.76% gain of the operating system market in one month!

Look for January to carry another increase and for AAPL to break 10%, probably diminishing the effect of Steve’s health-related absense a little bit.

In related news the iPhone browser share also grew.  It now holds 0.44% of the market, a move from 0.37% last month and the largest single month gain for the device. Windows dropped almost a full point from 89.62% to 88.68%. Pocket IE is no longer tracked, probably now <0.01% market share. Playstation remained at 0.04%.

For more in-depth detail of market share, visit http://marketshare.hitslink.com.

Apple’s OS X operating system base grew by 0.66% between October and November to 8.87%. If they simply maintained the prior month’s pace, they will reach 9.5% in December and 10.1% in January (assuming a continued consumption of 0.6% from other operating systems per month).

Vista being a monstrous failure is only helping, and XP is nearly a decade old. It seems almost difficult for Apple’s marketshare not to jump beyond double digits.

Take a look at Piper Jaffray’s 12 unanswered questions to see how their Q3 and Q4 sales turned out. The new MacBook and MacBook Pro have been great successes. Apple also plans to open 20-30 new stores in FY09.

UPDATE: Remember too that 10% may not seem like a lot for the operating system, but 10% of the hardware sold is absolutely huge.

Check marketshare.hitslink.com after January to see if I’m right…

Michael Lewis’s article The End is covering Portfolio’s December issue. It’s a fantastic read on his forecasting the death of Wall Street back in the eighties in his book Liar’s Poker.

It highlights many of the insanities and irrational modes of operation amongst the firms of Wall Street and is an entertaining and solid I-told-you-so. I disagree that Wall Street is dead… But his insight shows us how things have to change.

The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.

It’s a must-read, here are links worth following along the way:

• Must End (the article, Portfolio)
  
• Liar’s Poker (Google)
• Liar’s Poker (Wikipedia)
• Google Blogsearch (“Liar’s Poker”)
• Twitter (“Liar’s Poker”)
• Ji Lee’s site (artist of the photoillustration on the cover of Portfolio)

Been using Google’s Chrome browser for a day, and so far it’s a great experience.

No. Sorry. That’s an understatement. It’s revolutionary. As the comic describes (yes, Google released a comic to introduce Chrome), this browser takes the web to impossible places. It makes the web more like an operating system, allowing each site (tab) an independent process and memory allocation, improving javascript speed – via a virtual machine – by orders of magnitude, and integrating more cleanly with Gears.

I’ve liked the browser enough to find Windows more useful than OS X this morning. A strange feeling indeed.

I’d mentioned in an email yesterday that the question was whether Chrome would quickly grab users away from Internet Explorer and other browsers or if it would be incremental in its chipping. My expectation is that it will still be chipping, but it’s going to be much faster than expected.

Just as the Google search tool grew wildly popular purely out of speed and relevance, the Chrome browser will gain huge momentum because of speed and relevance. Since there are still massive amounts of IE6 installations out there (proving that not everyone goes out and upgrades) a swing won’t happen over night, but it will gain ground more quickly than Firefox or Safari (Opera not mentioned since Chrome pretty much destroys the reason for Opera’s existance – speed).

A couple questions are begged… Is this where we really see web 2.0 take hold? I think so. And how does this affect Google in terms of monopolizing the web? They now own search and could quickly dominate the browser.

The New York Times published Say So Long to an Old Companion on the 28th of July.

The image above is the invitation from the audio department at Hachette for a party to mourn (read: celebrate) the passing of the cassette technology. Their final audiobook released on cassette was “Sail,” by James Patterson and Howard Roughan in June of 2008.

Cassettes held out far longer for audiobooks than music because they allow the listener to resume wherever they left off, in any device that supports a cassette (getting harder to find these). CDs took up about half of the audiobook market and digital download is already looking to surpass CDs in music.

This is great for me and the team, working on audiobook digital downloads. Developing software distribution allows an amazing amount of flexibility and ease of use. Digital allows us to resume where the customer left off (benefit of cassette), as well as provide a deeper connection through metadata and images. Through our Zip process, we help make it easy to put the audiobook on a device such as an iPod, WMA player, Windows Mobile or PalmOS phone.

Kind of like ice sublimation, audiobooks will sublimate directly to digital. No need to stop at a usurped physical media.

Most smartphones slated for release over the next 12-months include a GPS receiver, built in. After that, it will be a marked failure to not include a GPS in a phone. The functionality that comes with GPS is outstanding – mapping, directions, location based experiences, etc. We’re about to enter an age of advancement in technological capabilities that we’re just beginning to imagine.

Consumers are moving to smartphones. The hottest smartphones (iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Bold 9000, most of Nokia’s Symbian and HTC’s Windows Mobile offerings) all include GPS and an exposed API for developing applications utilizing their hardware. Anything people can conceive of for location based mashups will be coming (more on these mashups in later posts)…

Here’s a first application…

BlackBerry is a leader in mobile phone GPS. Recently a few services that announce the location of one’s phone emerged. Initially these were billed as a sort of low-jack for one’s phone, a security service for the insecure (or those who want to spy on their kids, etc).

I decided to try a few of these. Most felt slimy, like, “you always know where your phone is, and you could also know where your wife is!” … I don’t know about you, but my phone is loyal and doesn’t run off with strangers… And I trust my wife far more than a phone.

My goal with trying these services was to mash Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and other social networking services with my location. Such a mashup will allow me to share my real-time location with all friends. I came across BlackberryTracker.com. Much like the others, the idea is to provide you with the location of your phone. However, they have something the other’s don’t… Facebook and Google Earth integration (as well as a drop-dead-simple semi-RESTful API).

Friends can pinpoint me down to the meter on my Facebook profile, updated every 30 seconds. To be honest, it feels strange to openly publish this data. Security, and lack thereof, has us believing we shouldn’t share such information. But this fear is caused by the exception and not the rule. And in reality, my location in public isn’t private. Additionally, there are laws and common courtesies we live by, and I trust that people are inherently good.

Soon these services will be in the mainstream. Everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Let me emphasize that… Soon everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Not publishing your location will be like not having a mobile phone.

image of flux capacitor intended as a joke – time dilation not included

There is a certain problem with time travel that a software engineer or sys admin will automatically understand. It has to do with relative versus absolute paths. As mentioned in the title, this applies to instantaneous time travel (time travel via time dilation does not experience this problem).

This realization came up while having an aviation discussion with AgentM regarding GPS. Somehow the idea of flying a small aircraft from today, 1,000 years in the future without GPS for navigation, came up. That led to time travel…

The problem is that the universe and everything in it is moving. A point along the equator moves, relative to the center of the earth, at 1,040 miles per hour. This means traveling 30 seconds backwards or forwards in time, to the same absolute path in space, would result in a spacial jump relative to the starting point of 8.67 miles (1,040 mph / 60 minutes in an hour / 60 seconds in a minute x 30 seconds).

All values for speeds acquired from RASC Calgary Centre. Their page on ‘how fast?’ is an awesome resource.

That’s only relative to the earth – The earth is moving through space relative to the Big Bang’s origin at 1,342,000 miles per hour. A jump in time of only a single second, with a constant absolute spacial path, puts you off course by 372.8 miles (probably miles above or below the earths surface in the process).

Let’s go back to calculus for a moment. Remember limits of functions at infinity? This is how one solves the spacial challenge of instantaneous time travel. For those who left their calculus books at home, this limit describes change as a function approaches an instant (usually as time or speed approach infinity or zero).

This becomes challenging to apply to instantaneous time travel because all physical movements known to man result in an instantaneous speed of zero. As proof, take the earths movement of 1,342,000 mph (a pretty high velocity) and divide it by infinity (what would happen at an instantaneous point in time). You get a speed of zero. Kind of like taking a picture at 1/5,000 of a second… Most everything stops. Except this is 1/infinity of a second.

This speed of zero is your relative path. A relative path of zero means your absolute path does not change, and therefore you remain in the same location while the rest of universe kept moving. A major problem.

To solve the spacial challenge of instantaneous time travel (and so you can land in the same place you jumped) one must have an instantaneous relative path that equals the function of one’s present location’s relative path to all universal factors.

Such universal factors include, but are not limited to, the earth’s rotation, the earths revolutions in the solar system, the solar systems rotation in the galaxy, and the galaxies movement in universe. Additionally, forces like black holes, comets, gravitational forces of satellites, and wind direction need to be considered.

This function becomes incredibly complicated, but let’s assume we will be capable of such calculations at or before we’re capable of making a human’s instantaneous velocity 1,342,000 mph. Manipulation of such a relative path would allow one to come out of instantaneous time travel in a completely different location, effectively teleporting.

Put simply, for successful time travel and/or teleportation, calculating the instantaneous velocity will be necessary.

While doing my typical searches for new and interesting people on Twitter to add to the flow, I noticed something indicative of Spring cleaning. You see, when you search Twitter, you usually get pages of people who haven’t updated in a year or accounts with zero updates – ever – and six months stale.

None of those cases seem to be true for my latest search results. There are a couple accounts with no updates in a year, but they’ve got a lot of updates, so they’d likely not be pruned. Either Twitter created a better search algorithm (unlikely, since the results are haphazard and not chronological) or they pruned the dead accounts (makes a lot of sense – I myself got an old account). When I’ve worked at community driven companies, we’ve done plenty of account trimmings.

Twitter doing prunings makes a lot of sense. This is a benefit to the user base, and a huge benefit to Twitter’s load. If this is truly the case, you might do a search for your favorite name about now… And if it isn’t, at least rejoice in a better mechanism to find the people you’re looking for.

:

When following a lot of friends in a flow environment and using XMPP, one sees the above numbers in less than ten minutes. I’d been using Adium, but Adium doesn’t smooth scroll between each received tweet. It constantly jerks messages upwards and has made it virtually impossible to have a meaningful experience. There are often times when I want to read each incoming tweet. A good, smooth, reading experience was needed.

iChat has a slightly smoother hit at each received message, and is therefore much more enjoyable to read. The interface is customizable enough, but nothing quite as nice as some of Adium’s minimal themes.

I was mostly hesitant to switch since Adium has outstanding AppleScript support. I’ve been thinking of prototyping something (given a couple hours – someday). Apparently iChat has something even better which I should have known about… Callbacks! A script can fire for each received message.

This will make dynamic, real-time, filtering a reality.

The start of something very cool…

Useful link: flow entries

Follow me on Twitter: sol

I read the flow of XMPP Twitter traffic with breakfast and in the evenings. I then scan it when checking email or if I catch a lot of added traffic on the IM window. The part which most people don’t understand is how this translates and how it’s even immaginable to distinguish signal from noise here.

It’s easy. I’m now following over 4,000 fellow Twitterers (Twitterites? Twitterans?). The TPM (Tweets Per Minute) ranges between 20 and 35. This equates to the Twitterers I’m following announcing, approximately, once every two hours (obviously some are once a day and some are every 10 minutes).

Reading the flow at this rate is easy. You have tweets coming in 24 hours per day, but you absolutely can’t follow it the entire time. Feeling like you have to read every Twitter announcement your friends send is the first psychological obstacle to get over. Once you get beyond that feeling of needing to maintain control, you free yourself to dip in to the news of the moment as reported by everybody.

To ensure I’m not missing any messages specifically to me, I keep a browser tab open (usually immediately to the right of my GMail tab) to the Twitter Replies page.

The main trick to keeping a strong signal is being selective in who you follow. By tuning this early, you avoid needing as much filtration later. To date I have only filtered out a single spammer account.

One last point is that some feel this approach is a pull technique in which I’m getting, but not giving back. I  disagree. I submit my status and the special news and information I come by. I encourage people to follow me so they’ll be able to have an insight in to my thought processes and activities.

Given the present rate of flow, I see 10,000 as the next step. It’ll take a while to get there with a selective approach. In the meantime I’m interested in metrics and whether Twitter will continue to be a best source of this data.

Any service could provide an XMPP flow… Imagine Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, etc, offering an XMPP feed of updates. FriendFeed with an XMPP flavor would be incredible.

Here are my previous flow entries so you’re up to speed:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5
• Day 6 (no post)
  

I’m visiting my in-laws this weekend so haven’t been spending much time in the flow this weekend. However, even with short stints I’m finding a recurrent issue. Each day I think I’m going to hit a maximum number of people I can pay attention to. Each day I’m proven wrong. There’s an adaptation that takes place.

I’m following almost 3,400 and it’s working very well. I could imagine 5,000 being more than comfortable. Even on a standard IM client, the data flow is manageable. Most IM clients don’t smooth scroll, so it’s annoying to have each incoming tweet snap prior tweets upwards.

I’ve been thinking of the outline for a high-traffic Twitter client spec:

• XMPP for tweet flow.
• Web Services harnessed for contact management.
• RSS/Atom integration for pulling articles from Twitterer.
• Caching of existing Twitter contacts to embed information in to the XMPP traffic.
• Search and real-time filtering.
• Ability to only show tweets with links.
• Additional filters based on: Age of Twitter of account, Location, number of tweets, ratio of following/friends, has non-default avatar, has non-default twitter design… with real-time color-coding of tweets.
• Ability to favorite a tweet that came through XMPP.
• Auto-pull of a Twitterer’s most recent blog entries (requires a scan for RSS feeds on the Twitterer’s home page, then pulling/parsing those items).
• Auto-addition of Twitterer’s RSS in to Google Reader or other items.

With the above, one would have a complete Twitter news-room. One could immediately see what’s flowing and have access to a Twitterer’s additional information. This may be possible with a Flash or Java application, though I’d prefer a highly portable objective-C or C++ app. Maybe even ported to mobile clients (maybe, maybe).

Something that has piqued my interest in the last year are trends for technology professionals overseas, especially Asia. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I believe it’s important to have an understanding of where the worlds employment markets are…

ZDNet Asia is more frequently featuring stories of significant salary hikes and movement. Local papers and blogs describe brain drain between Asian countries.

This is all interesting because in the dot com bubble days of the late 90′s until about 2003, articles pointed to a brain drain of talent from Asia to the US. Now we’re seeing talent shortages there as countries attempt to equalize the ex/im of intelligent personel. It would make sense that if salaries rise beyond what American firms are willing to pay, we’ll see a reverse brain drain.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

It’s been 4 days with a flow approach to receiving data. I skipped adding more people today and focused on getting used to the incoming content. It’s become easy to follow along, so I’ll be adding again. Last night I experienced a reading nirvana while reading Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations (on the Amazon Kindle)… My reading was faster than ever. Unexpected and a real thrill.

The amount of data one can ingest seems like it could become a real measure of intelligence, like a hybrid or modified number of pages one can read per hour. Unlike pages, characters or kilobytes are easily measured and this type of ingestion stat could become interesting.

Today Twitter’s XMPP went offline for a couple hours. It was odd to not see movement out of the corner of my eye. Having the flow is no longer distracting (except when it’s not moving). I have it on the right side of my right hand 24″ monitor, and I scan it for links and more interesting items when I spend time on email (once an hour or so).

The metrics for the day with 2200 friends (averaged over a period of 10 minutes – after the jump):

• 6:00AM EDT: 11 tweets per minute.
• 8:30AM EDT: 16 tweets per minute.
• 2:00PM EDT: 23 tweets per minute.
• 4:00PM EDT: 25 tweets per minute.
• 5:00PM EDT: 22 tweets per minute.

It’s easy, out of the corner of your eye, to see flow increase and decrease in speed as interesting topics pass by.

Dave’s blog mentions wanting a timed mute feature which doesn’t notify or remove a friend from your list. This would be so easy in an XMPP client. Just use the ‘off [username]‘ command via an AppleScript Adium Xtra. An iCal reminder could be set to reset it, or a more elaborate database could be built.

I’m still daydreaming of the perfect XMPP application for combining Twitter traffic and other features. A smooth-scrolling, highlighting based on friend rating (perhaps by popularity or personal setting), app with web service API harnessing contact management would be insanely useful.

To save Twitter’s servers from getting buried in XMPP traffic, I could see value in flows covering certain genres of people. This would basically be an XMPP rebroadcast people could subscribe to. XMPP could start getting traction because of this.

Google, with their search algorithms could be king in this space. I’d expect Yahoo! to be great here too with an XMPP version of Pipes. The whole flow experiment thus far feels like digging for information before Google came along and offered exactly what you wanted. Except in this case, you’re getting an obscene amount of what you want… And I can’t wait for more.

UPDATE & CORRECTION: In the original post I incorrectly identified Naked Conversations as being written only by Robert Scoble. Shel Israel co-authored the book with Robert and it was neglectful on my part to have not given him equal credit. I offer my sincere apologies and a thank you for the correction.

Additional links:

• Scoble’s take
• Dave’s block-with-timeout
• Steve Gillmor’s Swarmtracking

As developers, if you’re building services your customers can share, you need to plan on announcement integration.

I keep thinking back to February when I wanted a better way to integrate Twitter. Others wonder about Twitter being a source of lost content, as Cartoon Barry describes well. If a visitor is on my site I want to ensure they can consume everything they’re looking for without bouncing. If they prefer to consume the content elsewhere that’s fine… but they shouldn’t miss it here.

Dave Weiner was looking for a way to integrate a daily links entry back to his scripting.com (he was posting to Twitter and skipping the daily post). Dave started using the prefix “!” so he could have a service read his Twitter feed and build a daily post. This is a good start, but my thought is that this isn’t the way to go. My ‘starred items’ idea is also not the right approach. Both are moving from Twitter to the blog. Twitter is the announcement service and if we can automate its announcing of what we’re doing, we don’t have to do anything special.

Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc are announcement services. Their power is in providing an API other services can hook. The best solution is to intelligently connect Twitter to what you use and to encourage the services you use to integrate with Twitter. Or if you’re building sites and services, do it so your customers get this benefit.

The web-world I see in the next year offers announcement service integration. When I find a site I like, not only does StumbleUpon or Google Reader suck it up and share it for me, but an announcement is fired through my service(s) of choice. When I make changes to Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profiles, an optional announcement is fired outside their gardens.

This approach doesn’t neglect the social networking aspect of these announcement services. A response should be pulled back as a comment, if available/applicable. All of the announcement services have response API calls. The social aspect of these services is retained and the content becomes more valuable as it is connected with its target.

Think efficiency and value for your customers – Bring announcement to an automated state.

Steve answered, “We change our minds a lot. The web apps have worked well, but developers wanted to do more. And we heard that. Creating an SDK is a lot of work, you want to make it something you can live with for 20 years, and yet update it without breaking apps. This is an elegant and clean system.”

I’m certain Apple had the SDK in development since before WWDC ’07. As Steve said, it takes a long time to develop an SDK. They just weren’t ready to announce it yet last year and covered by offering web apps. Their marketing machine and product release practices entice us to want more. We hated Apple last summer for it!

The remainder of the question was handled by Phil, “Second question. Electronic submission will be very fast, and this is a whole new process.”

A lot of people are screaming bloody murder about Apple controlling this process. While I don’t really like the idea of only getting Apps installed via Apple’s system, it could be a lot worse. Apple will be CHiPs, not the DMV. There will undoubtably be apps which make it possible to download and install while being untethered anyway.

The impression I got during the sign-up process to develop for the iPhone and download the SDK was impressive. Not because of the smoothness of the process (I hit terrible snags due to the server congestion), but because it’s obvious they’re going to allow developers to easily publish apps. What I got out of it is they’re making it better and easier to write software for the iPhone than for Windows Mobile or other handhelds. Apps will be as easy to publish as an album of music… Same model.

Dave Winer has been leaning towards the negative side of Apple’s plans, but he likes the idea of an untethered podcatcher. I’d love to talk to him about that… It’s something I expect iofy to work on.

The iPhone SDK has been a long time coming. Apple has been working on it since before last June’s WWDC ‘07, despite pushing the “You can build amazing web applications” message. The reason for pushing the only-web-apps decree was because the API, tool-chains, development environment, etc, weren’t ready.

Back at WWDC ‘07 the development community felt slammed by the news that we couldn’t build native applications or otherwise access the great hardware features of the device. We grumbled and asked questions, and were told it was a marketing/branding/positioning decision.

Back then there was a feeling of something amiss. The voice of the engineers at Apple seemed to speak, “one more thing.” Every time an attendee took the mic and posed a question about iPhone access (there were a lot of these questions) the engineers responded with wobbly words about web apps while exuding a sigh of, “it’s coming…”

It just flat-out felt like Apple had to make their June 29th release date for the device and they couldn’t get the SDK complete. Standard feature-drop. The typically well groomed Apple machine was recovering from an all-nighter just to get the iPhone itself released.

At the time I wasn’t certain of an SDK in the works. As most developers returning from WWDC I was dejected – they have to have an API, they just have to! I even agreed to a bet in early July ‘07 with my company president: Apple releases an SDK within one year of the iPhone release.

I’m looking forward to March 6th for more than winning a bet. On Thursday I find out if my prediction was correct and if I read the Apple folks. If we get a healthy suite of tools I’ll have validated my assumption that Apple had an SDK under way prior to WWDC.

UPDATE: Cartwright Reed reminded me the bet was an official iPhone SDK from Apple that iofy could use. This is important since I (and all developers looking forward to the SDK) could still lose if the SDK is only accessible to companies blessed by Apple. So far this seems unlikely.

Added FriendFeed as a combinatorial service. You can get all my updates and information in one single location there. There will be tons of these sites very soon, followed by an inevitable shakeout. Should be interesting see who and how the best of these services connect.

http://friendfeed.com/sol You can follow my blog, Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Stumble Upon, and LinkedIn streams there.

It should be even more interesting to see how much funding they get and whether Web 2.0 falls for the ‘eyeballs-are-worth-more-than-revenue’ bologna.

UPDATE: Hey, wait a second… Why not just find me at solyoung.com, where I’m already combining these streams!?

Yesterday I asked the question, “Random House DRM-free a hoax?“ The question was based on Cory Doctorow’s post announcing a big move by Random House towards DRM-free MP3 audiobooks. The PDF on his site links to a letter by Madeline McIntosh detailing the move to Random House’s partners.

Since my post both Cory and Madeline have confirmed the validity of the letter. Thank you to both for following up and answering the question.

While it seems many are rejoicing over the supposed announcement of Random House going DRM-free, it also seems this could be hoax. BoingBoing, care of Cory Doctorow, brought the story to light. But something doesn’t smell right…

Don’t get me wrong – this would be groundbreaking and very fast for an industry that doesn’t usually take big risks. But there’s a lot bordering on the edge of too-good-to-be-true and not sitting right.

Cory Doctorow broke the story on BoingBoing.net, where he claims to have gotten hold of an announcement. The announcement isn’t available anywhere else on the net.

The content of the letter is downright mouth watering for folks looking forward to DRM-free content.

“The results: we have not yet found a single instance of the eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally.”

Seriously? Not a single one? Were there no sales? There will be piracy with any content. Everyone expects this. The issue is not whether it will happen or not, but whether DRM-free content leads to increased sales, increased profits, and increased customer love. The statement that not a single instance occurring is hard to swallow.

I’m not saying it’s a hoax – only that I’m looking forward to getting more facts and seeing how this plays out. I’ve written to Random House for comment but have not yet received a response.

UPDATE: Madeline McIntosh, Random House publisher and author of the letter, confirmed this morning via email that the letter is not a hoax (also confirmed in the comments below). This is exciting and game changing news in the audiobook industry.

I’d go for that. I’ve written about what I like about Yahoo! and the reasons I like them as a company without search. Nokia making a play for Yahoo! makes sense. It creates a strong combination as a mobile platform company from two forward thinking complimentary companies…

So unlikely, yet I couldn’t hope for a better Yahoo! suitor. I’m sure we’ll be seeing mobile manufacturers picking up more of the web-co’s.

<prediction>We won’t be looking at an all-out brain-drain, but with the present economic climate in the US and the present growth in Asia, we’re looking at some movement of IT in the next five years.</prediction>