Claudia Mitchell lost her arm in a Motorcycle Accident, but the Rehabilitation institute of Chicago has created a prosthetic arm for Claudia that moves, *controlled by her own thoughts*. This is done by implanting the arm nerve endings in her chest wall where she can control them using her mind. Incredible.
So, what happens when we can start to control a computer cursor with our mind and have web browser enabled eyeglasses? Wow, we’d be …. smart.
This is a rich, wonderful film about meeting, and overcoming, the challenges faced by inner city American youth. You’ll recognize Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) and Angela Bassett, both are great as the teacher and the parent of Akeelah, a gifted young girl who seeks the national spelling title. Keke Palmer is superb in the title role. This is a fantastic and uplifting movie yet it avoids the common hollywood pitfall of pandering to politically correct or stereotypical charicatures of African American Culture. (note a few language and minor references to drugs and gangs which are totally appropriate in the context of the film).
I noted before that Google is mostly ignoring the enterprise market in favor of maintaining their huge share of regular user traffic and targeting small content producers with Adsense and small advertisers with Adwords. In fact I think FAST, rather than Google, is the top contender in enterprise search. As the internet itself becomes the network, I can see Google grinning in meeting rooms as they chart out the competition with Microsoft which is still heavily chained both economically and philosophically to Microsoft Office, big enterprise applications, and big companies in general.
Incredibly, Microsoft seems to ignore (or perhaps they just can’t cope with) forces that Google correctly sees now and on the horizon. These forces include:
* Company sizes will tend to shrink as internet efficiencies allow “mom and pops” to compete globally.
* Small companies, blogs, local companies, and other small “long tail” online entities market share will continue to grow, and may even become the largest share of total online advertising activity. (though I think this could take many years).
* Many USA, and (most?) Indian and Chinese companies often use bootlegged software. No problem for Google who gives it away anyway. MS office at perhaps $479 per lost license? OUCH!
It’s a tough spot for MS because their online revenues are trivial now, so even with the major allocations to the LIVE project it’s not clear that changing course can ever replace the enterprise and office suite revenues for a company built around “old style” computing.
Joe Duck 