Time Magazine notes:
From politics to movie-making, from NASA to NASCAR, exciting new changes are occurring — and so is the very process of innovation. For one thing, corporations and universities no longer dominate the world of new ideas. Instead, we’re living in an age of individual innovation spurred on by the Internet as well as a form of group project best represented by resources like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is edited by the masses instead of an elite cadre of professional editors.
I like it. I’m big on the implications of the explosive growth of global online communities, the programmable web and all the other cool things that happen when the notion of social and corporate networking is extended to an increasingly robust global information network (aka “the internet”).
How the money will flow in this brave new networked world extravaganza is less clear than how the information and innovation will flow. Wall street still views and invests as if heavily capitalized, large corporations will dominate the landscape for some time, though they are again warming up to the idea that little companies can make a big difference. Myspace.com’s 580 million valuation and Skype’s even higher number give even the humblest small biz programming people cause to work a bit harder to find “the next big thing”.
Joe Duck 