The Economist has published a special report on telecoms in emerging markets – a collection of articles looking at how the spread of mobile phones in developing countries is reshaping the mobile landscape.

Of particular interest is the development of new phone-based data services which go well beyond simple music downloads and gaming.  The evolving mobile networks are also poised to bring full internet access to a mass of people in the developing world who have so far been largely excluded from the Web.  This will surely open up exciting new opportunities for developers and independent software vendors who are savvy to the needs of these emerging markets.

A $1-million prize offered by Netflix – an online movies rental service – has been claimed by a team of algorithm developers.  Netflix had offered the prize three years ago to anyone who could improve the accuracy of its recommendation engine by 10%.

Netflix, like many other successful online businesses, relies on an algorithm to predict its customers preferences and recommend other movies for rental.  Well over 50,000 contestants have attempted to rise to Netflix’s 10% challenge over the past three years.  Two teams finally managed to improve Netflix’s recommendation engine by an identical 10.06%.  Team Bellkor  – consisting of seven researchers who had pooled their resources after working independently – managed to pip its rival team Ensemble to the post by a mere 10 minutes!

Update:

As a follow-up to this hugely successful prize challenge, Netflix has announced a second contest with another million dollars up for grabs.  This time, they are encouraging developers to optimize software to predict a user’s movie preferences based on demographic information such as age, gender & domicile.   Check out the Netflix Prize site for more details.

The New York Times also ran an interesting article on the emergence of the “prize economy” where organizations of various stripes are offering multimillion dollar prizes for advances in a range of fields.

Innovation is crucial for the growth and sustainability of any business large or small.  Successful small business owners tend to be natural innovators, driven by necessity, opportunity and ingenuity.  Unfortunately, small businesses generally tend to have fewer resources to dedicate to innovation.

InnoCentive is one way to stretch your innovation dollar.  Modeled as the “world’s first open innovation marketplace”, InnoCentive uses the reach of the internet to help firms seek innovative solutions to their problems.  A company can sign up as a seeker to post their challenges or problems on the InnoCentive website and offer an appropriate cash prize for the best solution.  A network of solvers will then compete to win this cash prize.

Apparently over 400 challenges have been solved since 2001 in a wide range of fields covering technology, business processes and even economic development.  Some of these solutions have been scrutinized by independent auditors and have been shown to have impressive returns on investment and payback periods.  A big advantage that the InnoCentive approach enjoys is that companies pay for practical results rather than just effort.

Coca-Cola remains top of the heap in Interbrand’s 2009 list of Best Global Brands.  IBM, Microsoft, GE and Nokia make up the rest of the top 5 in the list which remains unchanged from the 2008 ranking.

Interbrand brands itself as the largest global brand consultancy and produces the Best Global Brands list annually.  It ranks market-facing brands with at least one-third of revenues originating outside its home country through a combination of traditional financial analysis and various measures of the brand’s strength.

Asian representation in the list is mainly through a handful of better-known Japanese brands – Toyota (8), Honda (18), Sony (29), Canon (33), Nintendo (39), Panasonic (75) & Lexus (96).  South Korea’s Samsung (19) and Hyndai (69) also fared well.

The United States government is embracing the cloud computing model in an effort to address its rising IT costs.  US federal CIO Vivek Kundra recently announced the launch of the Apps.gov website where US government agencies can acquire and deploy cloud computing applications.  While sensitive and secret data will continue to be handled by secure government-operated facilities, there is vast potential for savings for Uncle Sam if agencies can leverage low-cost, web-based technologies for routine, non-sensitive applications.

Cloud service infrastructure and application providers like Amazon and Google are certainly eying the public sector market with keen interest. The US government alone spends over $75-billion on IT, for example.  These technology companies are thus working hard to address issues related to the security, privacy, and data management concerns that are typically associated with a move to the cloud computing paradigm.

Smartphone sales is set to surpass PC sales globally by 2011 according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky.

While the total sales of mobile phones has actually decreased on a year-on-year basis in 2Q 2009, the smartphone segment has shown a healthy 27% growth despite the economic downturn.  Much of this growth can be attributed directly to the spectacular market gains by Apple’s iPhone.  RIM’s Blackberry range also contributed significantly to this growth.

Nokia, though a little late to this dance, has recently picked up the mantle again with the N97 model while the original smart-phone pioneers Palm are back in the game with the Pre and its spanking new WebOS platform.  Even traditional PC giants like Acer & Dell are  piling into this lucrative segment.

The good news for consumers is that many vendors are scrambling to produce cheaper smart phones.  These are designed to run on open operating systems such as Symbian or Google’s Android platform and targeted at the pre-paid subscription market.

A New Zealand accounting executive found out just how damaging capital letters can be.  She was fired for sending confrontational e-mails filled with capital letters.  For added measure, she also “provocatively highlighted phrases in bold or red”.

At some point. most of us would probably have been at the receiving end of similar fully-capitalized rants.  But how exactly did this all-caps style become associated with yelling?

This BBC Magazine article provides an interesting peek into the development of capital letters.  In the beginning capped letters were actually reserved for formal writing.  Nowadays, however, being too liberal with capitals can apparently be a capital offense!