Thomas Hawk, a longtime member of the Flickr community writes:

Today is Flickr’s 8th Birthday. Whatever you may or may not think of the service today, without a doubt Flickr pioneered social photography. I joined Flickr during year one in August of 2004, shortly after it was launched to the public. What I found there was more than just a place to host my photos, I found a vibrant community full of great photographers who were willing and eager to engage with each other through the site. I found an audience that appreciated creativity and the ability for us to come together and share art in mostly a non-commercial setting.

When Yahoo bought the company — I broke the news – it was pretty clear that Ludicorp, the tiny Vancouver-based company behind Flickr, could change the search engine, which at that time was trying to differentiate itself from its main rival, Google. Of course, none of that came to pass. Flickr today languishes in the shadow of newer photo sharing services such as Instagram. It never really adapted to mobile. The beautiful, simple user experience has become cluttered.

Yahoo has never really appreciated what it has in Flickr: a community of passionate people who share moments and experiences through photos — a concept  that has since found its way into Path, Instagram, 500px and Facebook. Talking about Facebook — it is 8 years old too and is about to become the greatest wealth creation engine since Google.

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• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Amazing, because I just finished a post about Google’s me-too-ism affliction. Amazing, because as MG Siegler points out, the Mountain View, Calif.–based Internet giant will make hardware.

Amazing, because Google thinks that it will actually be able to crack the consumer electronics marketplace. Amazing to think that this company will build a supply chain and manage relationships with retailers and get people to buy it. (Or it can sell directly over the web, much like it did with its Nexus phones — pun intended.) Amazing, considering that the company’s track record on products beyond its core offerings — search, advertising and communication-oriented software — is spotty at best.

Amazing, to see one of smartest companies show such lack of discipline and self awareness. Amazing!

P.S.: By the way, this is the mystery Google device that Stacey Higginbotham reported last week.

Like Dropbox, Google’s storage service, called Drive, is a response to the growth of Internet-connected mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and the rise of “cloud computing,” or storing files online so that they can be retrieved from multiple devices, these people said.

Drive allows people to store photos, documents and videos on Google’s servers so that they could be accessible from any Web-connected device and allows them to easily share the files with others, these people said. If a person wants to email a video shot from a smartphone, for instance, he can upload it to the Web through the Drive mobile app and email people a link to the video rather than a bulky file. [The Wall Street Journal.]

The question we should all be asking: How is it that Google, with its vast army of smart people and billions of dollars, couldn’t build a cloud storage drive over past five years? Why did it fail in its previous attempts and how is it that a company whose core competency includes “infrastructure” has failed to build this very basic cloud offering? And most importantly, how can a company that is intimate with the concept of cloud and owns Android, the mobile computing platform, not be able to understand the strategic importance of an “online storage drive”?

What’s Wrong With Google?

The answer for those questions lies in what I see is a growing problem at the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant — me-too-ism. Saying that won’t win me any fans — certainly not amongst the Google faithful — but the fact remains that with the exception of “search & advertising” & “communication” — its two areas of core expertise, Google has been unable to predict where technologies are going to lead the society (and yes that does include business.) Android? That came through an acquisition and that too at the insistence of one of Google’s founders.

Where Google does have a stellar track record is web infrastructure and innovations in network design and architecture. And that is because, infrastructure is Google’s DNA. The companies, I have always maintained, have a DNA and it is what makes the companies self-aware, which in turn defines how they view the world, how they compete, hire people and most importantly build products. Google has spent a lot of its corporate energy chasing Facebook instead of focusing on what was really important — not only its present, but its future.

Social as it stands today is a battle between two companies — Facebook and Twitter. Google’s quest to become social is making it do some unnatural things. Instead, Google should have been figuring out ways to use its infrastructure and delivering magic on the Android phones. Some good examples include Google Voice on Android or Google Mail on Android.

The reason they are so impressive are because they leverage Google’s awesome infrastructure. A virtual online storage drive should have been top priority for the company. Why? Because it would have enhanced company’s Android experience. Many of Google’s customers — handset makers like HTC who are using Android are turning to Dropbox to add more space to the phone.  In an interview  Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston told us:

Dropbox can help deliver on the “connected anywhere” promises that have been around for years, but that he doesn’t think have truly materialized with regard to data. But once consumers experience having their “stuff” with them wherever they are, it will be “like the first day of the rest of your life,” he explained, like when we first were able to boost productivity by using e-mail and other applications on our phones.

A month later, when Houston and I chatted on stage at our GigaOM RoadMap conference in November 2011, Drew hinted that the company was looking beyond what was simply storage.

Dropbox will also be able to store not only a person’s photos but the metadata about that photo, the location information. “All of these things become possible. We can index all that metadata in the pictures and then tell you where the picture is taken, and maybe give you all the pictures taken within ten mile radius.” This sounds like a lot more than storage.

Google, too, should have been looking at its “drive” from the perspective as Dropbox long before now. It would have allowed the company to get better traction with app developers and at the same time differentiate from its biggest mobile rival, Apple.

Google is really good at finding information and using the “drive” as a hub to connect to various services, and then finding information on top of that should have been a primary focus for the company. Instead, it went chasing Facebook and social. Much like Microsoft kept chasing and chasing and chasing opportunities in search and advertising.

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• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future

A few weeks ago when Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM, came to the board and suggested that we should try and acquire paidContent, my fellow board members — Jon Callaghan (True Ventures), Ammar Hanafi (Alloy Ventures) and Kevin Brown (Reed Elsevier Ventures) — didn’t hesitate for a minute. The ethos of paidContent and our company are in sync. GigaOM’s core belief is that as connectivity becomes ubiquitous, it changes everything from society to business to we the people. paidContent from the very beginning has been built on the idea that connectedness is and will change media. It makes perfect sense for us to team up. Since then, Paul and his team worked tirelessly to make it happen.

OK, now you know what. Let me tell you why.

Now, why are we doing this deal, clearly the biggest of our five-and-a-half-year history? Two simple but equally powerful reasons — the first and perhaps most important reason: people. I have been an admirer of paidContent’s editorial team from the very beginning of its journey. Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer were two of my favorite writers in the early days of professional blogging. And while Rafat (who is on our board of advisers) has moved on to new things, I am glad to have Staci join us. She has been instrumental in building ContentNext from the ground up, and in addition to writing, she has been building the company’s event business. I am thrilled to announce that she will remain the editor of paidContent.

Ernie Sander who spearheads the ContentNext editorial operations is the kind of veteran everyone on our team, including me, can learn from. And for that precise reason, Ernie is going to become the executive editor of our sprawling online editorial operations. Our managing editor, Nicole Solis, is being promoted to VP of Editorial Operations. And then there is the most awesome team of journalists — Robert Andrews, Tom Krazit, Daniel Frankel, Laura Hazard Owen, Jeff Roberts and Amanda Natividad. In addition there are a wonderful group of technology, business and sales people who are joining our company. I welcome them all to our growing family and can’t wait to break bread with them in weeks to come.

Location, location, location

These fine folks are actually going to help bolster our presence in New York and help increase our footprint in Europe, a region of key strategic focus for GigaOM. (We will be hosting Structure:Europe in Amsterdam, October 16-17.) With this deal, we are really pleased that one of the most forward-looking media outlets around, Guardian News & Media, will become a shareholder in our business.

As you all know, I am (and will always be) a displaced New Yorker; New York City is my spiritual home. By increasing our footprint in the capital of the world, I would get a chance to go back more often. But it’s not an emotional tug that is driving us to this decision. New York is fast becoming a major technology hub, as Ryan Kim outlined in his recent post. And we want to expand our coverage to Boston — thanks to Barb Darrow who joined us several months ago — and the Washington DC corridor as well. paidContent’s New York City offices are now GigaOM East.

Media is the new Wild West

We are quite strategic about our acquisitions — we acquire media entities only if we love the people and believe that we are at the starting phase of a trend. In 2008, we acquired jkOnTheRun as our tip of the hat to the growing demand for mobile devices and the changes it would bring into society. Later that year, we brought in The Apple Blog because we knew the best was yet to come for Apple. Both of those acquisitions have helped GigaOM cover the issues that matter most to our ultimate customers — you, the reader — in a smart, sensible fashion.

“The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”— Clay Shirky

Shirky’s observation means that we are in a time of chaos where the very idea of media is being questioned. And as a Chinese proverb says, from chaos emerges opportunity. I believe the best is yet to come for media.

Over the past few years we have started to see the transformation of media by new technologies, new methods of distribution and newer ways to consume information. Mathew Ingram has been writing about these disruptions on a regular basis, and now we are going to double down on what we think is a great new chapter in the media industry.

I have always believed that we’ve got to stop thinking of media as what it was and focus on more of what it could be. In the world of plenty, the only currency is attention and attention is what defines “media.” Zynga is fighting Hollywood for attention (and winning). Instagram is taking moments away from other media. They have attention. There are old companies that are dying and new ones that are being invented. We’re eager to expand our coverage of social and digital media editorially, in our research and at our events. paidContent is the best chronicler of the media industry, and by blending their coverage with ours, we hope to watch this fast-changing industry ever more closely.

Please join me in welcoming the ContentNext team!

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• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters
• Why Google Android’s Electric Vehicle Deal With GM Matters

“Recently, I’ve noticed a cambrian explosion of data among several of the companies I work with. The number of different numbers being tracked daily is massive. When you walk into their office there are screens full of graphs on the wall. Everyone in the company has access to the trends over time across a number of dimensions. These graphs are pretty, the numbers are dynamic, and there are often blinking lights to go along as a bonus.

A few months ago I stood in the middle of the office of a 30 person company and stared at the flat screen TVs hanging from the ceiling showing an array of graphs. I’m sure my mouth was open as I tried to process the data and make sense of it. I knew this particular company well and could reduce the number of different data points to a small set, but I was completely overwhelmed by the visual display. As I systematically looked at each of the graphs, I realized very few of them mattered much, nor where they particularly helpful in understanding what was going on in the business.

At the moment I realized these were no longer magic numbers. Instead, I was looking at wallpaper. Data porn. The entrepreneurial Aeron chair equivalent of 2012. Pretty, but a bad allocation of resources. The 30 people in the room might be looking at the graphs. They might be looking at one of the graphs. But they probably weren’t seeing anything.” [Brad Feld ]

PS: We will be talking a lot about data with/without context at our Structure: Data conference, to be held in New York on March 21-22. (Register for the event.)

• NowStreet Journal asks, what would have Facebook S-1 (and IPO) looked like had it come out in the days when tech stocks were given the small stock treatment? Also: Why Facebook is failing, Why Facebook’s growth is slowing so much and Evaluating a big network, which isn’t the same as a big product.
• It is time to move on from the social internet and instead dream of what Gideon Rosenbaltt calls place-based networks.
• Brilliant Kevin Kelly comes out with a list of things/trends that are going to be part of modern society in coming years. It is a delightful little post. I am fixated on Mirror Worlds and GlobeNet he talks about.
• Talking of Kelly and Wired magazine people, John Battelle, the founding managing editor of Wired, writes about Google and its recent moves and puts them in context of Facebook. I am not sure I have read a better post on Google than this one.
• I have never been a fan of Davos and Bruce Nussbaum does a good job of articulating why.  The Death of Davos Man–The Death of Davos is heck of a read. Plus 10 things you are not allowed to say at Davos.
• Information doesn’t want to be free, argues Andy Weissman. Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free. I totally agree, and I said so in my piece from last year, Old media is being unbundled, just like telecom was.
• Happiness takes a little magic, says Brian Lam. +1 to that.

Emails, tweets, notifications, text and instant messages, Facebook status updates, Path moments — all these are new tools of communication when taken together are notification hell. These notifications prey on human desire for a dopamine fix. And just as we are over-caffeinated, I think the 21st century is quickly making us over-notified. (I think this is my second new phrase of the week – the first one being aspirational escape velocity)

The worst part is that there is nothing we can do about it. Apparently Tweeting and checking emails is much harder addiction to give up that cigarettes or alcohol, according to a study by Chicago University’s Booth Business School. No surprise since they are all about attention gone awry. The dopamine fix, I guess is worse than nicotine. Especially since it is free – while a fine bottle of scotch can cost a pretty penny.

What all this multitasking is doing to our brain is hard to imagine. This video by Chris Crutchfield does a good job of being a mirror to our over-notified selves.

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• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competition

• The Bottom Line - The initial read-through for ZNGA is potentially a negative indication for ZNGA’s 4Q revenue estimate.
• Assuming ~93% of ZNGA’s bookings are generated through FB (average of first three quarters of 2011), then total net FB bookings for ZNGA for 2011 would be $1,117mm (based on FB’s ZNGA rev of $445mm divided by 30%, generating gross FB bookings of $1,484mm for ZNGA, then multipled by the 70% that ZNGA keeps).  This implies $268mm in total net bookings for the fourth quarter, while our model estimates $302mm in 4Q bookings.  In other words, unless ZNGA has meaningfully diversified its revenues away from FB, it could miss our 4Q bookings estimate.
• Additionally, this ignores the fact that some percentage of FB’s ZNGA revenue is generated by ZNGA’s purchase of FB advertising, thus the actual ZNGA bookings from FB is likely even lower.
• Where we could be wrong – there could be other definitional items around revenue recognition and advertising that we are failing to incorporate into these estimates.

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• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

And much like Netscape and Google before it, the $5 billion offering is being viewed as the much-awaited catalyst for the technology industry and is expected to set off a flurry of activity. I have been here long enough to cover the IPOs of both Netscape and Google, and on both occasions, the tailgate effect was enough to pull even the clunkers (read: marginal startups) to the proverbial finish line.

We are already seeing four recently public companies — Pandora, LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon — ramping up their efforts to buy little startups. Google is competing for talent, and so are other Internet giants. And now Facebook!

I have been wondering whether we would see a slow exodus of Facebook employees, which in turn would force the social networking giant to go out and start acq-hiring people by buying a lot of tiny startups. And if more of these little companies get acquired, more dollars will rush into the startups and thus create a fly-wheel effect. The presence of Facebook millionaires is only going to accelerate angel investment activity.

Nevertheless, I wanted to see how some of the top venture capital investors (whom I deeply respect for their clear and concise views of the industry) were thinking about the landscape.

Fred Wilson, a general partner of New York–based Union Square Ventures and an investor in red-hot companies like Zynga, Etsy, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and Kickstarter, emailed me back with this answer:

Yes, I said exactly that on Friday evening at a talk I gave at social media weekend at Columbia University. I think this is great for entrepreneurship, startups, angel investing, etc., etc. because we are going to get a bunch more capital created and entrepreneurs created and we’ll also get more exits.

What this means is that super angels and hacker universities like Dave McClure, Y Combinator and TechStars are going to see a lot more of their companies get acquired. Jeff Clavier, the founder and partner of SoftTech VC, an early-stage investment firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., who recently closed his $55 million fund, had a multitude of thoughts:

Because of the ginormous valuation, it is clear that the number of Facebook employees reaching tens of millions of dollars in (paper) net worth is unusual. Candidly a number of early Facebookers have already taken off and “retired” at the age of 30/35. One of the questions moving forward is how much of a carrot can Facebook give new employees with such a high base valuation.

Remember that Facebook has a very high bar to talent acquisitions, and should not compromise on that. Once Facebook has a public currency, it will make it easier for them to make larger paper acquisitions. Until recently they were not doing that to avoid issues with the 500 shareholder rule (Ed Baker’s Friendly was a rare, recent deal where equity was used).

Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and a general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture.

One of the biggest challenges Facebook will face is the gulf between the have’s and have-not’s within Facebook.  It can create tremendous internal stress and can result in people leaving to follow their own entrepreneurial dreams. This can be both for early people who made it and love the thrill of the startup, and for later people who are contributing, gain confidence, and now want to go off and make their own fortunes.

I think Silverberg’s point is pretty spot-on. I have seen this haves-versus-have-nots dynamic create havoc at many companies before. I have spoken to multiple people, and there is a general sense in the Valley that there is a large contingent of Facebookers who are ready to bolt. Google in comparison didn’t see an exodus of employees until recently, mostly because of its deep engineering-centric culture. Before it was grafted with the Microsoft genes, Google was a company where the smartest people went to be with the smartest people. It wasn’t till 2007 that the company started to lose its top-rated talent.

Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way missive not withstanding — is a lot more mercenary and materialistic. And part of that means employees are likely to cash their chips and run, only to place them on some new startups. And whichever way you look at it, I am pretty sure 2012 is going to be one heck of a ride. Buckle up!

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• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Christensen was the vice president of emerging opportunities at Skype, a division of Microsoft. In that role, he was responsible for getting Skype into new platforms such as Internet televisions and set-top boxes. He was a big champion of Skype’s platform effort. On the eve of the launch of SkypeKit program, he told us, “One of the key pillars of the communications network is that it follows Metcalfe’s Law, and so to date with things like Facetime we’re talking about services with limited support for devices, while our strategy is to be on Android and everyplace else we can.”

Here is Skype’s official statement on Christensen’s departure:

“After six years in key leadership roles with Skype, Jonathan Christensen has left the company to enjoy time with his family and get energized for the next phase of his career. At different periods during his time at Skype, JC has led the Audio/Video, Core Library and Skype Developer Program teams, in addition to overseeing our platform and partner initiatives with consumer electronics manufacturers. Skype wishes him every success in the future.”

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• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

South Korean and Japanese cities dominate the top 100 cities list. Amsterdam is the fastest city in Europe (ranked No. 33), and San Jose was once again the fastest city in the United States, with an average connection speed of 13 Mbps. It was ranked at No. 13 among the top 100 and was one of the 23 U.S. cities that made the list. Other U.S. cities in the top 100 include Plano, Texas (8.9 Mbps); Fremont, Calif. (8.6 Mbps); North Bergen, N.J. (8.5 Mbps); and Jersey City, N.J. (8.2 Mbps).

One of the biggest trends according to the report is growing mobile broadband speeds. “Average connection speeds on known mobile providers ranged from 6.1 Mbps down to 327 kbps, while average peak connection speeds in the quarter ranged from 22.2 Mbps to 1.4 Mbps,” the report data shows.

Here are some other notable facts from the report:

• The global average connection speed continued to see extremely strong yearly growth, increasing 39 percent from the third quarter of 2010.
• The global average peak connection speed grew 45 percent from the third quarter of 2010 to 11.7 Mbps in Q3 2011. South Korea is the country with the highest average peak connection speed, at 46.8 Mbps. Hong Kong also had an average peak connection speed above 40 Mbps, while Romania, Japan and Latvia were all above 30 Mbps.
• India finally achieved a 10 percent broadband adoption rate, which China had achieved in the second quarter.
• Despite rapid growth, China and India are only two countries with high broadband adoption of 1 percent or less. China stands at 1 percent adoption, and India has a 0.6 percent adoption. Akamai deems connections faster than 5 Mbps as “high broadband.”
• In the third quarter of 2011, global broadband adoption (2 Mbps or higher) grew 1.6 percent to reach 66 percent. The United States now has 81 percent broadband adoption, the report says.
• By average speeds, the Netherlands might be the fastest in Europe (9.5 Mbps), but when it comes to peak speeds, the Romanian city of Timişoara leaves it in the dust at 41.5 Mbps.

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• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

“Program and design from the mobile standpoint first, then extrapolate what could be applied for the PC, television and print experience.” – Michael Bayle, VP and general manager of ESPN Mobile

Apparently, for ESPN, mobile is now “the company’s fourth-largest network” and “has 150,000 people plugged into its mobile offerings at any given time” with “users spending 45% more time with ESPN mobile content in 2011 than the prior year,” according to this report in Media Post.

Those numbers are stunning — but not surprising (to me, at the very least). With more than 400 million smartphones expected to be sold, it makes perfect sense for sports to get the mobile bump. I mean, don’t we want the baseball gossip, score updates or results of the F1 race when on the go?

I have been a firm believer that when it comes to design these days, mobile comes first. That thinking was behind the redesign of my blog. Of course, I saw an increase in mobile visits and decided to go the full monty with my blog makeover. It is good to see that “mobile-first” thinking is spreading: Kayak and others are following the mobile-first approach.

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• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competition

One such startup, Palo Alto-based Glooko today announced that it has received $3.5 million in Series A funding from a group of investors led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a investment firm started by former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya. Well known Silicon Valley veterans such as Bill Campbell, Google’s Vint Cerf, and Cisco co-founder Judy Estrin are also investors in the company which has previously raised $1 million in seed funding.

Glooko has developed a MeterSync ($40) cable that plugs into most standard self-monitoring blood glucose meters and the Glooko Logbook app for iOS devices that automatically creates a digital logbook of readings, allows users to review daily blood sugar levels, annotate them and share the results with their physician.

Yogen Dalal, Glooko co-founder and chairman explained to GigaOM that the company is going to use the new funds to focus on supporting more meters and develop an Android app in addition to getting more attention in the market place for its offerings. Glooko is not the only company that is seeking to make a mark in the digital health device business. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2012) there was a noticeable increase in the number of digital health devices.

A growing, global problem

According to the Mayo Clinic, diabetes is a group of diseases that impact how our body uses blood sugar. If you have diabetes, you would have too much glucose (sugar) in your blood and this leads to many complications and serious health problems.  It is one of the fastest spreading diseases in the world.

According to American Diabetes Association (ADA) nearly 25.8 million children and adults in the United States of America who are suffering from diabetes. (More stats here at the ADA website.) The situation is equally worse around the world. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, there are 350 million diabetics around the world.

What you need to know

Those statistics might be numbers for you, but for me it is a fact of life. I am one of those millions who have been afflicted by this disease. I have learned to live with it – and medication is only part of the solution. The key to keeping diabetes under check is to exercise, being careful about food intake and most importantly one has to constantly monitor sugar levels. If I don’t, then in a few years it is pretty clear that more serious complications can arise.

How do I keep on top of things? Using a mix of analog and digital solutions. Every time I tested my blood sugar level, I wrote down the reading in a little black book and also in BloodSugar, an iPhone app. I jot down what I eat and when I eat. I monitor my weight on a weekly basis. And at the end of the month, I enter all the data into an excel spreadsheet, which I share with my doctor whenever I see him. This is a painful and arduous process, but I am betting that one (or more) of these new startups will figure out a way to make my life easy.

For instance, Glooko is making it easy for me to take the daily measurement data right out of my diabetes monitor and making it available via their iPhone app and cable. Just like Glooko, I am excited about the upcoming smart logbook app from MySugr, a company based in Vienna, Austria.

The fact that MySugr co-founders Frank Westermann and Frederik Debong are both diabetics is one of the reasons why I feel that they have a proper understanding of the emotional realities of living with the disease. The company has developed a smart logbook (still in alpha) that uses game-mechanics to keep diabetics motivated in taking better care of themselves.

Glooko and MySugr are by no means the only startups. There are many more out there who are working on ways to deal with this growing epidemic. As someone who lives with the reality of diabetes, I can only but welcome your efforts.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Forecast: the future of the digital music industry
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content

When I was reading The Number by Alex Berenson, it became pretty obvious that the curse of quarterly results is leading to short-term thinking and will be the undoing of the pursuit of big ideas by large companies. That book explains a lot of the problems encountered by the incumbents in today’s fast-changing world.

The second book that I often go back to is The New Normal by Roger McNamee, a longtime technology investor in both public and private markets. McNamee might have become a punch line in Silicon Valley (thanks to his ill-timed bet on Palm), but when it comes to big-picture thinking there aren’t that many who allow themselves to think freely. In his book McNamee argues that we are in a new era and as a result shouldn’t be thinking about the past. Rather, we should face up to what he calls the “new normal.”

McNamee’s argument aligns with my own belief that if you walk looking backward, you are going to run into a pole. Instead, look back, only to see how far you have come. As a chronicler of technology, one of the biggest lessons I have learned is that innovation is almost always unpredictable — in size, timing, scope and impact. In other words, the business of technology is constantly defining what is the new normal. In case you were wondering why I am bringing this up, I will point to some stories I read this week.

An Apple a day . . .

Earlier this month, Apple announced what are essentially mind-boggling financial results for the holiday quarter ending Dec. 31, 2011. The iPhone maker surpassed even its own very generous targets and in the process has confounded its critics and champions, especially in the professional investor community, with a financial performance bettered only by a handful of oil and energy monopolies’.

No one was expecting it. Forget that: No one was daring to imagine it. Why were these professionals unable to make even a prediction of Apple’s success? Because they were always looking back, looking at Apple’s history and listening to the rhetoric of Apple’s rivals and thus making a prediction. I mean, how can Apple, which blew its lead in the PC business and fell by the wayside, do things differently? It couldn’t have learned from those mistakes, right?

No one wants to think about the fact that Apple, like Gucci and BMW, has achieved what I call “aspirational escape velocity.” If the Chinese are ready to line up for a product (the iPhone 4S) and pay a premium for it, even though it is likely that a cousin was involved in assembling it, something must be going right. So why is it then that buying an Apple product like an iPhone or an iPad is the new normal?

Reimagine

Why are we surprised that Apple and Samsung are seeing such huge demand? How hard is it for us to imagine that the cell phone — even an expensive smartphone — is more necessary than, say, a computer was twenty years ago?

Why is it hard to imagine that the world is one giant mesh, and marketing messages from one end of the Earth do indeed have an impact across the planet? If you take that into account then Apple selling more than 40 million iPhones in three months is not as crazy as it seems.

Earlier this month, web measurement and analytics company comScore reported that Pinterest, a tiny company based in Silicon Valley, is now the tenth-largest social platform, with billions of page views.

It propelled itself into a group that included Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Amazing isn’t it, considering that the service is still at an invite-only stage?

But it shouldn’t be surprising. Remember, with every passing year, the metabolism of the technology industry has increased. It took Yahoo more than a decade to blow past 500 million users. Facebook will hit the billion mark in six years.

What seems incredulous incredible today is par for the course tomorrow. I remember the novelty of email. And now I deal with the nightmare of email. I remember the initial thrill of the instant message, and now I live with its constant interruption. Technology is, and will always be, redefining our future.

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• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
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There is a lot of talk about data, 3D printing, innovation, design and user interaction and curation. So this week’s theme is a collection of writing that questions conventional wisdom about these aforementioned themes. Most of them are long — so better get a cup of tea now.

• Data trumps opinion, especially when it comes to design, argues Adapative Path’s Brandon Schauer. He outlines four examples in his post.
• The myth of the new brand new innovation myth: Is that headline giving you a headache? If you look beyond it, the article is a great treatise on innovation, the individual and the team dynamic.
• There is a lot of optimism and hype around 3D printing these days. Christopher Mims over on Technology Review magazine isn’t buying it. He thinks it will go the way of virtual reality.
• After a long break, Rohit Bhargava, one of my favorite writers on marketing, returns with the four principles of delusional economies.
• I am neither an engineer or a designer. However, I do know a great primer when I read one. This is a great design primer for engineers from Michael Loop.
• 7 ways to organize your home office in 2012: Given how cluttered my home office gets, I found this list from Herman Miller’s Cerentha Harris quite helpful.
• As you all know, I am obsessed with Pinterest these days. But here is a fresh and wonderful take from a non-techie, who describes the social aesthetic behind the fast-growing social sharing service.

PS: By the way, in addition to the Om Says newsletter, you can stay in touch with me via Twitter (@Om) or on Facebook (http://facebook.com/ommalik).

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• Forecast: the future of the digital music industry
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

During the fourth quarter of 2011 (which ended on Dec. 31, 2011), Verizon lost 103,000 DSL lines. In comparison, it lost 118,000 DSL lines during the third quarter of 2011 (which ended on Sept. 30, 2011) and 127,000 in the quarter ending June 39, 2011. The numbers at AT&T are worse. During the fourth quarter of 2011, Ma Bell lost 636,000 DSL lines, up from 501,000 during the third quarter of 2011 and 451,000 during the three months ending on June 30, 2011.

Now compare this with Time Warner Cable, which added a whopping 130,000 broadband connections, way ahead of the 96,000 lines that Wall Street analysts were predicting for the fourth quarter. And that is one of the worst cable broadband providers in the U.S. It would be interesting to see how well Comcast does when it reports its earnings on Feb. 15.

So why is DSL continuing to nose-dive? First of all, the phone companies themselves are not interested in pushing the envelope on DSL and instead are focusing on their higher-end offerings: FiOS Internet for Verizon and U-verse for AT&T. Verizon added 201,000 subscribers for its FiOS (fiber) Internet service during the three months ending on Dec. 31, 2011. In comparison, AT&T added 587,000 new U-verse broadband subscribers. U-verse uses fiber-to-the-node technology in combination with VDSL2, a variant of DSL. AT&T lost 49,000 net broadband subscriber — mostly DSL.

The question is, Can this newer technology make up for the subscriber losses and help Verizon and AT&T grow their overall share of the U.S. broadband market? From the looks of it, I don’t think so. I expect Comcast, which currently is the fastest broadband provider, according to Ookla’s Net Index, to see market share gains. However, this loss of traction by the phone companies in wired broadband makes the recent spectrum deal between Verizon (buyer) and cable companies (sellers) a problematic deal for those hoping to keep broadband competitive. These numbers show how wireless is going to AT&T and Verizon while wireline will go to the cable companies. And apparently the executives at each company are okay with that.

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