The best way to think about the value of Instagram is not to think about $1 billion or $30/user, it’s this: 1%. There is no market more strategically valuable to Facebook than mobile, and there is almost no product more valuable than photos for them. It was a very unique situation where a $100b company made a 1% bet.

source: GigaOM

BitTorrent:

could potentially be used for video conferencing, live streams of video game tournaments or even live sports events...started to run a number of  field tests streaming weekly live music events with the P2P protocol.

The ultimate winners of a P2P-based solution could be consumers, he argued, because it would enable publishers to put much more content online at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDNs.

 

source

The Next Web:

If you’re a salesperson, and you’re approached by a male/female couple, always sell to the woman. The most successful salespeople in the world knows this to be effective, and it’s exactly what Pinterest is doing.

women tend to like to shop more than men do. You could easily define Pinterest as a way for people to “window shop” for anything that interests them, whether that’s a physical object or something as intangible as quotes. They can then show off their "purchases" (pins) to their friends, and even re-pin and create discussions around what they’ve found.

Today is Stop SOPA Day.

Tim O’Reilly:

right now the entire content industry is facing massive systemic changes, and to claim that declining sales are because of piracy is so over the top. Any company that is providing great content online in a way that’s easy to use with a fair price has a booming business right now. The people who don’t are trying to fight that future.

So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future.

Laws like SOPA make us sclerotic as a country, where we have all these extra burdens that provide little benefit. In general it makes America less competitive.

"The problem isn’t congestion, it’s a stagnation", says GigaOM:

unless the industry figures out how to give people connectivity at a reasonable costs, wireless will always be luxury access technology and ubiquitous connectivity will be a pipe dream.

it’s at least 200x more expensive to use cell networks

Right now, sending a bit over the cellular airwaves costs a lot more money than it does to send that same bit over fiber or even DSL.

consumers may have to accept lower quality service for streaming video, might end up paying for access to a carrier Wi-Fi network and will need to accept their operators monitoring the applications they use.

Something to take away for developers:

There’s a role for developers here in building tools that help consumers see exactly what their operators are doing, and the FCC should stay active in enforcing the spirit of the network neutrality rules.

Something like whatismycap has offered.

Greenpeace report:

It takes more than efficient design and energy management to make an on-premise data center green.

You really need the right location to provide available, economical, renewable, and reliable power to truly harness a green offering, and the cloud gives you flexibility to source the services in a location that naturally provides these types of green benefits,

Cloud is not an either-or question for on- or off-premise; it is a usage and business model for utility computing. Although running such a utility computing resource on-premise cannot reach the scale of off-premise, it still is Cloud.

Caterina Fake:

One of the things I try to do when I build software is to find a balance between making products that will naturally appeal to people, but without being exploitative of human nature. It is a challenge but I think it’s doable. I’m interested in user-generated content,community, collaboration and people’s creativity and self-expression. When you work with these kinds of things, technology can make you more human, rather than less

Some interesting stuff added to http namespace of the 3.1 release.

Notable addition:

• Remove session cookie on logout
• Single session with blocking of second attempt
• Multiple http element with stateful and stateless support

Cool, now supporting protected REST API has become a breeze.