Technorati.com reports it is tracking more than eight million blogs so we must be onto something good. Then again, Mary Meeker, who was once known as the "Queen as the Internet" believes blogs are huge business opportunity. This should doom blogs given Meeker's dubious record during the dot-com boom. Meeker never met a dot-com she didn't like even if it was burning through venture capital and had no prospects of success. She made a valiant attempt to get her street cred back by jumping on the Chinese dot-com sector but what does a New York-based analyst really know about China. Mary, if you're really into blogs, start one up and show us your "wisdom". But please stay away from touting the blogosphere as the next big investment opportunity. We've drank the Kool-Aid before and, hopefully, learned out lessons.

Although I have a Blackberry, I have to confess that I'm not really hip with the whole text-messaging phenomena. Why tap out a message when a simple phone call will do, right? There are, however, millions of Canadians - a majority of them probably teenagers - with a major addiction as more than 710 million text-messages were sent last year compared with 352 million in 2003. The wireless carriers have to be wildly cheering from the sidelines as text-messaging has become another pillar - along with e-mail, games, ring tones and Web access - in their aggressive data growth strategies. A simple back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests text-messaging generated about $100 million of high-margin business last year. The mobile messaging market in North America will take a major step forward in the next year or so as high-speed networks using 3G and EVDO are turned on. This will make it easier for consumers to send and receive photographs and video clips. You can bet carriers will be more than happy to charge a premium price for the honor.

Phone+ has an interesting story on the low chances of VOIP upstarts such as Vonage Holdings and 8x8 Inc. being snapped up by telephone carriers and cablecos because there is no competitive pressure to make a deal as the market is still emerging. With the exception of perhaps Vonage, this thesis is probably true because there isn't a start-up with features so compelling it attracts an offer. In other words, it's not like there is a VOIP version of Google that has taken the market by storm by offering something so different and wonderful from what's available now. Over the next couple of years, you will likely see carriers and cablecos try to build their own VOIP businesses. For carriers, it's a matter of elegantly and economically moving customers from circuit-switch systems to VOIP, while the cablecos charge ahead with Internet telephony.
At some point, however, a carrier or cableco will look at its VOIP strategy and decide it needs to be kick-started by acquiring Vonage and its large customer base. Clearly, price will be an issue given Vonage's value seems to be climbing with every new subscriber it adds. Then again, there are people such as Andy Abramson, who are starting to question Vonage's math.
The bottom line is M&A within VOIP from a service and software/hardware perspective has been, at best, minimal. Not sure if buyers and/or investors are waiting for more momentum before jumping on board but it's very un-dot-com like.

After spending far too much time aimlessly wandering the aisles of Home Depot last night, I got one of those "lightbulb" ideas. Wouldn't it be a great if you had a voice-activated handheld device to easily locate what you needed? To find a smoke detector, for example, you would talk into the device, which would then say "smoke detectors are located in aisle nine". You would then walk to aisle nine and quickly complete your shopping. This "brilliant" use of technology could reduce costs because you wouldn't need as many employees on the floor, and it would improve customer service/satisfaction. To use the shopping helper device, customers would have to leave a credit card of driver's license. I figure this device would be great for any big box-retailer such as Costco, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart and Best Buy. The big obstacle would be loading the data to make the devices work but that's for IT guys to figure out.