BusinessWeek has an interesting news analysis story on Research in Motion and the mobile e-mail market. While it touches on the Blackberry-killer angle, the story focuses more on how the market may be driven by applications that run on mobile devices other than e-mail. Palm and Microsoft have a clear advantage while RIM, which has the best e-mail application by a country mile, is scrambling to transform itself into a wireless application platform. I still think the killer mobile device is something that features a phone, e-mail, a calendar, Web browser and MP3 player. RIM is hinting at new models coming out later this year that will come with better displays and be EDGE-compatible but don't go dreaming about an MP3 player any time soon. RIM, by the way, plans to move some of its manufacturing out of Waterloo to off-shore locations in the next few years as demand increases. The decision seems like a no-brainer - not to take anything away from the folks in Waterloo.

Jupiter Research expects the U.S. online advertising market to double to $22.3-billion by 2009 from $9.6-billion 2004, propelled by the paid-placement search business. Jupiter expects the market to see double-digit annual growth until the end of the decade, which can only be good news for Google, Yahoo and all the other paid-placement wannbes (Ask Jeeves, etc.) that want to capitalize on the Internet's gold rush - notwithstanding the current investment frenzy in China what with the Yahoo-Alibaba.com marriage earlier this week. I wonder how much of the online advertising market will be allocated to blogs by 2009?
Going back to search engine for a moment, Rupert Murdoch plans to expands New Corp.'s Internet presence by launching a portal and buying a search engine. Rumors have it Looksmart and Montreal-based Mamma.com may head the list.