The chatter about Boeing's decision to pull the chute on its Wi-Fi service has mostly been focused on price and power issues. But Mike Urlocker (ondisruption.com) says it has more to what people actually do on airplanes (sleep, eat, watch movies), and Boeing's failure to change consumer behaviour. I'd link to the post but I'm on the 'berry but I'd encourage to check out Mike's blog, which has become one of my must-reads.

Here's an unorthodox - or different - thought for a Friday in the summer: maybe YouTube should strike while the iron is red, red-hot and do an IPO. Maybe co-founder Chad Hurley's refusal to flat out deny the possibility IPO reflects his gut instinct the video-sharing service's popularity would make it a slam-dunk IPO candidate. Sure, YouTube's business model is still work in progress, it's losing lots of money (expensive server and bandwidth costs) and there's that sticky, hush-hush, lets-not-talk-about-it issue involving the availability of unlicensed content such as The Daily Show. BUT YouTube is getting 100 million downloads a day, it has millions of loyal users, the potential to come up with a lucrative advertising model, and tons of buzz (Hurley sneezes and there's a story on TechMeme within minutes!). So let's assume YouTube is convinced to do an IPO, I would imagine there would be tons of interest from investors. For one, Vonage managed to raise $500-million - and it's a money-losing company in an ultra-competitive market. Another thing playing into YouTube's hands is the lack of Web 2.0 IPOs, which makes the investment landscape completely different from the dot-com boom when lots of YouTube-like companies (lots of buzz, little revenue, large losses) did IPOs based on "eyeballs". So maybe YouTube should adopt a carpe diem approach and hit the market with an IPO given investors would probably beg for stock. For more thoughts on YouTube's IPO dreams, check out Blogging Stocks.

The Wall St. Journal has a story based on a Cable Labs report that suggests the cablecos may have to make aggressive investments in their systems to compete with Verizon's fiber-to-the-home node technology. Needless to say, it's a controversial report that has already been rebuffed by some cable executives as speculation because bandwidth (a.k.a. bigger, fatter pipes) has been the cable industry's trump card in recent years as the broadband wars have become increasingly fierce. As a result, many investors have placed their bets on the cablecos amid the belief they could simply "fatten" their networks while the carriers struggled to keep pace. If the Cable Labs report is accurate, this could change this investment thesis. Keep in mind, however, that Verizon is one of the more aggressive carriers when it comes to FTTN with plans to spend a staggering $20-billion. In Canada, the major ILECs, Telus and Bell, are betting on fiber-to-the-node, which is a less expensive strategy, so perhaps the cable thesis is still and alive well, which is good news for investors in Rogers, Shaw, Videotron and Cogeco. For more, check out IP Democracy's thorough recap, GigaOm and Nyquist Capital.