Napster's Lost Potential: Don Dodge, who was v.p. of product development with Napster during the Shawn Fanning era, has an interesting insiders look at what happened and what could have happened before the P2P rebel was neutered. A point, however, you must question is Dodge's contention Napster had more than 50 million users willing to pay $5 a month or $1 a download. "That translates to about $250M a month or $3B per year. Even if Napster kept just 10% of the revenue that would be $300M per year against expenses of less than $10M. At the stock market multiples of the day that would have been a $15B IPO." The fundamental flaw in this argument is it assumes all of Napster's 50 million users would have been willing to pay for music, which is a ridiculous assumption. If Napster was really lucky, I'd willing to guess 1 million would have been a fantastic number.

Web 2.0: From all accounts, the Web 2.0 conference has been a roaring succesing - providing more evidence the conferece industry has come roaring back to health after a deadly period that saw the demise of Comdex. I wonder if Rick Segal, who's down on the whole the concept of Web 2.0 to describe the Internet's evolution, will be allowed to attend the conference next year. Given the event is not being Webcast - which seems like a strange move - the most intriguing things I've seen are Om Malik's lists of things about the conference, which can be found here and here.

Local Deregulation in Canada: So did Industry Minister David Emerson really said he wanted to see the $10-billion local phone market in Canada deregulated so Telus and Bell, et al could set their own prices? After conducting an interview with Emerson earlier this week, Bloomberg dutily reported it but the big quote to support their headline had nothing to do with deregulation and everything to do with accelerating the CRTC's decision-making process - something the the regulator is already implementing. I think Bloomberg tried to do a torque job to make a story out of a non-story. It's not like Emerson is going to tip his hat publicly before his three-person telecom review panel comes out with their report in the next three months.