Why Telcos Don’t Grok Open Standards (Simon Phipps) — Their history is of participants in a market where a legally-constituted cartel of suppliers commission specifications for key shared standards. Technologists contribute freely on the expectation they will recoup their costs through royalties for licensing the patents on their contributions. […] Since every participant usually ends up having at least some ideas accepted, most participants in the process have some claims on each standard, with the result that net royalties payable between the participants may not be the relative burden they appear if taken in isolation. But it does mean that late entrants to the market can face an insurmountable cost barrier.
The Next Big Thing (Umair Haque) — Umair frequently skirts the boundaries of Deepak Choprah-esque vacuous self-help, but I applaud his constant challenge to know your values and live truthfully by them. Hence here’s a minor challenge. Unless you want to spend your valuable life painstakingly eking out barely better solutions to problems we’ve already solved which give us answers that fail to matter in the enduring terms of the questions which do, consider the following: If we’re going to reboot our institutions, rethink our way of work, life, and play, then what are we going to redesign them for?
The Jig Is Iup (The Atlantic) — The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean. Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavor: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong. A different angle than Umair, but a challenge to think beyond building another declining value acquisition for your own personal benefit.
