The Internet Stock Blogoutlines the case that Yahoo is most likely to buy six apart, because “Yahoo! has no blogging platform”. Dave Pell pointed out an interesting idea, that when a large company makes an acquisition in a particular area, then it is difficult for them to acquire a competitor to it, since there would be internal resistance or operational complications from the existing team within the company. Consolidation tends to happen on the outside. On that basis, Google has Blogger and Microsoft has Spaces. So maybe Yahoo would buy Sixapart? Perhaps, since Google have Picasa, Yahoo could also buy Flickr. With Sixapart and Flickr, Yahoo would have added two formidable services to their arsenal.

People say that Hungarian is the language of the future, and it always will be. Similarly, you get the feeling that speech recognition is the technology of the future and always will be. Until recently the same was true of Internet telephony. There are many technologies that fail because they don’t pass the ‘good enough’ test. Having noticed that more and more friends are using Skype these days, it seems that VOIP passes the good enough test, for once the marketing blurb is right – it just works. In fact, beyond that, two recent examples illustrate that it is now better than other means of telephony. Example one: a friend’s cellphone ran out of juice, he resorted to war driving to find an open wifi network to contact me, his web based email didn’t work, couldn’t get a good enough connection to Instant Message me, but VOIP worked just fine….