Mozy was recently discussed here, so this may be of interest.

EMC Corp. (EMC) has reportedly bought American Fork, Utah-based Berkeley Data Systems, the company behind online backup service provider Mozy, for $76 million.

The rationale behind EMC buying Mozy is still unclear. But it should be a warning signal for dozens of online storage startups that are trying to get our attention. Perhaps it is time for them to start accepting whatever offers they can get — fast.

Mozy Acquired By EMC For $76 million

That’s quite an exit for Mozy - $76 million on just $1.9 million raised. Rumors circulated a year ago that Mozy was close to being acquired by Google for significantly less than this. The company eventually passed on the deal, which must have been a tough call. They clearly made the right choice in waiting.

Holy Mozy!

This is more a political op-ed than a book review, but there are some interesting ideas in play.

In today's splintered society, if you want to operate successfully, you have to understand the intense identity groups that are growing and moving, fast and furious in crisscrossing directions. That is microtrends.

... "the niching of America" : microtrends have replaced macrotrends.

The book is "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes," by Mark J. Penn.

Publishers Weekly says:

Culture buffs, retailers and especially businesspeople for whom "small is the new big" will value this exercise in nano-sociology.

Kirkus says:

will undoubtedly appeal to marketing analysts and armchair sociologists, as well as fans of Megatrends and Malcolm Gladwell.

The Trend in Trends

Is the United States in danger of losing its competitive edge in science and technology?

In response to this concern, the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness asked RAND to convene a meeting, held on November 8, 2006, to review evidence presented by experts from academia, government, and the private sector. The papers presented at the meeting addressed a wide range of issues surrounding the United States' current and future S&T competitiveness, including science policy, the quantitative assessment of S&T capability, globalization, the rise of Asia (particularly China and India), innovation, trade, technology diffusion, the increase in foreign-born S&T students and workers in the United States, new directions in the management and compensation of federal S&T workers, and national security and the defense industry.

These papers provide a partial survey of the facts, challenges, and questions posed by the potential erosion of US S&T capability.

Perspectives on US Competitiveness in Science and Technology

As the US military transforms to an information-based force, it will need processes and methods to collect, combine, and utilize the intelligence that is generated by its assets.

The process known as fusion will play an important role in determining whether this intelligence is used in the most beneficial manner. The process of fusion, combining pieces of information to produce higher-quality information, knowledge, and understanding, is often poorly represented in constructive models and simulations that are used to analyze intelligence issues.

This report describes one approach to capturing the fusion process in a constructive simulation, providing detailed examples to aid in further development and instantiation.

The Knowledge Matrix Approach to Intelligence Fusion

In this paper, we present a model of a trust-based recommendation system on a social network. The idea of the model is that agents use their social network to reach information and their trust relationships to filter it.

We investigate how the dynamics of trust among agents affect the performance of the system by comparing it to a frequency-based recommendation system. Furthermore, we identify the impact of network density, preference heterogeneity among agents, and knowledge sparseness to be crucial factors for the performance of the system.

The system self-organises in a state with performance near to the optimum; the performance on the global level is an emergent property of the system, achieved without explicit coordination from the local interactions of agents.

A Model of a Trust-based Recommendation System on a Social Network

I stood on a steeply sloping hillside deep in the Black Forest, panting, bathed in sweat and covered in mud. A group of llamas had stopped grazing nearby to watch me. After disorientation and fatigue, flying, driving, walking, and running, after springing over an electrified fence and sliding down a wooded slope, after losing my phone, my wife, and my bearings, I had at last found Martin Heidegger's hut.

Being There

There are two ways to look at anything. That’s what I learned from reading Steven Pinker.

Metaphor turns out to be our crucial talent.

...

Being a scientist is hard. You’re supposed to keep your personality out of the way, justifying every topic of interest by some larger theoretical goal. Pinker tries. “I like to think I have a better reason to introduce you to my little friends,” he pleads, referring to verbs and his infatuation with them. But as Pinker’s little friends consume the book, it becomes clear that he’s a geek.

Steven Pinker, The Double Thinker

Putting a computer in the kitchen is not a new idea. Neiman Marcus, the department store, included an ad for a Honeywell kitchen computer, priced at $10,600, in its 1969 Christmas catalog.

The ad featured a woman in need of a computer to manage recipe quantities and carried the slogan, “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute.”

The latest generation of kitchen computers may be more successful, and not just because the ads are less patronizing.

While in the Kitchen, Stir the Stew and Surf the Web

“The Indian Clerk” is a story about guilt. It’s about the impulse to save a foreign stranger (in spite of the fact that your idea of his country is no more than a couple of colorful clichés), and a story about a war in which the boys who die are most often poorer than the ones who stay at home.

Read the first chapter.

Lust for Numbers

The first thing you notice about "The War" is the stark edginess of Keith David's sonorous narration, a far cry from the anesthetizing drone of David McCullough (who narrated "The Civil War") and John Chancellor ("Baseball"). The second, though it may take a while to sink in, is the absence of historical talking heads, which, to put it as plainly as possible, reduces the film's pomposity factor by about 95%.

Burns has indicated that he wants his film to rescue America's war experience from the fog of dramatic myth that has obscured it since the release of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."

The Greatest Struggle