Nortel Networks, the once multibillion dollar telecom vendor now trading as a micro cap, may be considering offers of as much as $1 billion for its product portfolio of gear that lets phone companies string Ethernet networking to homes and businesses.
I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that start-ups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which just relaunched with a new format and features, including its own Flash-based document viewer. I think the service is great, but the business angle kind of makes me wonder.
It’s hard not to be a little nervous about the Google generation, what with kids these days. Look at them, charging off into one discomfiting trend after another–their YouTubing, their texting, their wanton social networking. To read the news, you’d think they were hiving off into a subspecies, raised with data ports in their heads meant to be plugged into Facebook at the age of 6, from which point on they will expertly recite the collective wisdom of Wikipedia with a steely look in their eyes.
Since I’m full of the milk of human kindness after a wonderful Christmas, I’ve been trying to remain calm in the face of all the Google Reader hysteria about shared items and so on–but wiping out on some ice yesterday and landing on my ass has made it hard to stay serene (combined with gashing my hand playing Wii baseball), so I can’t help pointing out that much of the moaning about “privacy” is just ridiculous.
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