From the Financial Times:

“Silvio Berlusconi has been in power in Italy for almost 50 days. Watching his new government in action is a bit like sitting down to view a bad old movie again.”

click here to read the full article

Today Nokia has announced the acquisition of Symbian. Nokia has also created the Symbian foundation that will provide a royalty free license to its members. Carriers Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo and AT&T, as well as Samsung and LG Electronics are becoming members.

Symbian is the operating system in the Nokia S60 smartphones and in some Sony Erricsson and Samsung devices, just to cite some.
Symbian is currently the world’s dominant smartphone operating system.

The problem with Symbian was that it constituted only the operating system and mobile phone manufacturers had created different UI platforms on top of it. Nokia for example has the S60 platform and Sony Erricsson has the UIQ platform on top of Symbian. The result is that different platforms are not compatible with each other.

The acquisition have the benefit to unite the several different software platforms under a standard platform.In fact, this is the most important message from the Nokia press: “Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform.”

The news in the press:

• Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian (Slashdot)
  
• Nokia Acquires Symbian – Goes Open Source (TechCrunch)
• Symbian Mobile Platform To Become Free, Rivaling Android & iPhone (Search Engine Land)
• Nokia to take full control of Symbian (Financial Times)
• Nokia in full buy-out of Symbian (BBC news)

Clayton M. Christensen and et al. have published a paper in IEEE Spectrum on how the semiconductor industry can successfully apply the concept of the Toyota Production System (TPS) to improve the production efficiency.

The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing, By Clayton M. Christensen, Steven King, Matt Verlinden, and Woodward Yang

The TPS was first described in 1999 by Steve Spear and Kent Bowen in the Harvard Business Review article “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System“.

Google Chief Economist Hal Varian (author with Carl Shapiro of the important book
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy) has a post on the Official Google Blog on “How auctions set ad prices“.

A must read if you want to understand how the advertising business model works at Google.

Interesting videos on the science of communication and persuasion.

Check the videos available on the FRONTLINE website the “PERSUADERS“.

In one of the video is featured Frank I. Lunt, author of Words that work, and inspired source of the Republican party. For a liberal counterpoint to Luntz, check out George Lakoff’s work, especially his book Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.

The iPhone 3G is out. Apple sells it as twice as fast half the price. Indeed, it looks pretty cool.

Some interesting related news:

• The NYT writes that New iPhone Pricing Model Is a Step Backward for Consumers since by subsidizing the cost of the new iPhone and locking customers into a two-year contract, AT&T is returning to a more traditional U.S. pricing model for cellphones.
• Apple has replaced .Mac with MobileMe. There is also an open source implementation, Funanbol that does many of the same things.
• From the NYT, Take That, Google: No Ads From Apple. Apple is showing new ways for the iPhone to check news, sports and e-mail. But it appears to be willing to ask users to pay fees to do so rather than subsidizing content and services with advertising.

The latest book by Prahalad on innovation:
The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan. A review of the book is in Businessweek.

Other important books from the same author:

• Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (the bottom of the pyramd is large and offers great business opportunities)
• The Future of Competition: Co-creating Unique Value with Customers by C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy (the concept of embracing customers and let them shape your business)
• Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad (in the book they introduced the concept of core competencies)

A must read for everybody interested in strategy and innovation (and not only).

Hardin’s The tragedy of the commons is a classic, a must read for everybody. Published in Science Magazine in1968 by Garrett Hardin, is about understanding conflicts over a common pool of resources. The article is one of the influential articles that have resonated in many different area from economics, politics to computer science and the study of depletion of natural resources.

Here an extensions of “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Hardin in 1998.

The Wikipedia entry.

If you want to improve your presentation skills, learn from the people that are good at it.

Check  Ted.com: ideas worth spreading