How is development of communication technologies going to affect house prices?

When "real" virtual reality is available, and when it is almost indistinguishable from physical reality (except for touch and smell), it will make it irrelevant to live in cities like New York or San Francisco. Those cities will not command a price premium in housing any more and house prices will go down, that's one view ...

Instead, the author of this article on the New York Times thinks that the price premium will actually increase, because people still want to stick together, and more so now than before.

This is the kind of post I was going to write, if I had time and the writing skills of this guy. In fact I had already started writing it, using a top-down approach, whereas the post I am linking uses a bottom up approach.

Completely agree with this: "This means that AdWords ads shown in search results drive Google’s earnings, but Google searches access less than 0.02% of the world’s information. Imagine what the other 99.98% is worth.

Here is the opportunity: how do you eliminate 50% of fraudulent clicks that you pay when you buy a campaign on Google? It seems like also Andre is talking about it too, here and here.

Well, to put things in perspective, 50% seems a lot, but it is not much compared to more than 50% which is lost on TV ads, and who knows how much which is lost on traditional banner ads sold on cpm (cost per thousand banner displayed).

Amanda Lorenzani interviewed me for Blognation, a new site similar to Techcrunch but focused on European start-ups.

Europe needs sites like Blognation, otherwise European start-ups, even if they offer an interesting product or service, would not have the same spot light as Silicon Valley start-ups.

Smells like bubble and it is not fun anymore.

This is why I am more and more interested in Microbiology and Artificial Intelligence and I am bored of Web 2.0 (as a word and as a state of mind).

This seems to be the situation in Germany. I would say that the situation in Italy is not much brighter ...

BTW: web 2.0 has no real meaning; it is only useful to describe the new Web Based business in general

I met Jeremy when he was on the Board of the Jabber Software foundation with me in 2001. Given Jeremy's background and Wales' background, they might really come up with an Open Source / Open Protocol service that could rival the de facto monopoly of todays search engines.