June 15, 2002 – Emergic

RSS Digital Dashboard

John Robb captures the essence of how to use RSS aggregation for enterprise information. This is the point: combine RSS feeds with Blogs, Outlines and Directories to build bottom-up knowledge management systems and personal digital dashboards in the enterprise. RSS feeds are the key: they can be extended beyond news and blog posts to “events”.

Steve Gillmor writes in a memo to Bill Gates: “Forget about the next Office. You can combine HailStorm, Groove services, and Internet Explorer today to create a self-replicating peer service that gathers private, shared data from e-mail, Weblog postings, and automated agents.” This is exactly what we are talking about. This is the opportunity of tomorrow — the new desktop.

Danger Ahead

An interview with the Danger CEO and CTO in News.com. Danger has launched the Hiptop, an all-in-one wireless device. Says Danger’s CEO:

The real question they should be asking is, “Is it a platform for third-party developers?” This is new. This is the first time that a phone has been turned into a platform for third-party developers. You’ll see a huge change and a huge shift on what the killer applications are. Danger is not saying that we’ve invented the killer application. We’ve just identified the opportunity that phones can become platforms.

When cell phones first came out, part of the reason they became so popular was because they were inexpensive and they worked the same way that your desk phone does. You have access to all the same content that you have for your desk phone. And there really hasn’t been a low-cost handheld device that offers that same kind of experience with what we’re used to on a desktop machine.

Its how we need to think of Emergic also [thanks to Veer for highlighting this — check his weblog called Knowledge Eldorado]. The Thin Client with the Linux Desktop will give the same desktop experience for a fraction of the cost.

Biotech in Asia – WSJ

WSJ on the growing Asian interest in biotech: “Governments around the Asia-Pacific region are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into biotechnology, recognizing the industry as an important growth platform, according to accounting firm Ernst Young.”