agree.... I hope the wireless careers can give some stiff competition to the wired incumbents like comcast, road runner and their ilk.... that did be nice!!!!!!!
There are a lot of areas which need critical breakthroughs to solve the increasingly critical circumstances casued by increasing population, increasing buying power and limited resourcs. The list would be a very very long.
But the single area that can accelerate developments in almost all areas is easy availability of massive, cheap computation and probably automated - impying AI, and the ability to use that.
I am not sure if this is a direct answer, but I think it can be indicative of possibilities. I worked with a contractor on Odesk, he was based in India. This is what used to happen - I used to pay him through Odesk, he had a paypal and XOOM account, and a bank account in an Indian bank in India.
He used to transfer money from his Odesk account to his Indian bank account using Paypal and/or XOOM.
quite often, in such company sales as well as in stocks/real estate and many other forms of investments, the sale price is a function of future earning potential. Of course, the future earning potential is not often the sole factor, but probably the single most dominant factor in the equation.
Even current profits/revenues are seen as an indicator of future health (along with being an indicator of current health) of the company.
$3 bil might not be much in the not too distant future. New markets that were not practically existent before or are far from being mature, are coming up online - read, india, china, brazil, south east asia and what not. Their online advertising industries have hardly developed, not that those in US or Europe have really matured. There's lot more to come.....
New models like twitter have shown quite a good capability in penetrating not only the developed markets, but also the developing markets. Of course, it still has a long way to go.
Around 5 years ago, I read an interview given by Bill Gates. In that, the inteviewer remarked about Gates' reputation for having in-depth knowledge on diverse subjects. And the interviewer asked, if Gates could just understand anything and everything.
I don't recall the exact wording of it, but this is the gist of it as I recall:
"I read a lot, on very diverse subjects. There are a lot of things that I do not understand at first read. But irrespective of whether I understand it or not, I complete reading them. Then I re-read them. I re-read to the extent that I want to understand them in depth."
Also, he claimed in the interview that he completely avoids watching TV, that he instead spends time reading.
Don't go on in the fear of another burnout. It will severely curtail your pushing yourself to your limits. Its only by pushing your limits and breaking them that you expand your limits. And it's by expanding your limits that you expand your capabilities.
Use the knowledge that you gained from your previous burnout to backoff when you are approaching another burnout. And if you did go through another burnout, use your experience from your last burnout to learn how to recover from this burnout. And then, keep pushing yourself on further.
Let the fact that you recovered from one burnout be a source of confidence. Thats one way to see it. The other way would be to keep going on in fear of another burnout and fail to try expanding your limits and capabilities.
It would depend on what I am tuning my life for at a particular period fo time.
Earlier, I used to tune my life with the purpose of filling two of my biggest bottlnecks to reaching my dreams, experience(/knowledge) and money.
I used to work long hours at my regular job to learn as fast and as much as I could. Then I used to go to another city on the weekends to do weekend work and make more money as future capital.
My way of living also used to be dead cheap (it still is, but with a different focus though). For a year earlier, I used to live in a 10' by 8' bedroom with just an airbed and the rest of the room filled with the all the rest of my belongings.
I also stopped cooking and became dependent on cheap, lean frozen foods from walmart and ethnic stores. In my view, when doing two jobs, the cooking and cleaning is an utter waste of life and time that can be better spent acquiring knowledge, including how to make money.
Later, I started a company while working fulltime. Then I started tuning my life to let me do that. Cut down social life and other thigns to a bare minimum, still lived cheap provided it didn't cut my ability to what I had to do, cut down the earlier weekend job.
Now I spend time learning stuff that would enable me to run my company better, execute ideas better, reaching out to my friends who might be insterested in joining what I am doing.
i still dont' cook and clean, waste of time especially when you know how to eat cheap. The airbed burst a few years ago, now I sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor - good way to remind I haven't reached my dreams yet and not oversleep too!
"....BioNectar4534.... " of Merc - that is so funny. Where do they come up with names like these?
The energy density of batteries is probably going to be the single most critical deciding factor for future car weights. The day the battery densities reach 10 times the current ones... the possibilities would be very, very interesting...
What if there were a site where non-profit orgs, non-government orgs or charity orgs can post 'jobs' (unpaid) on a website and people can volunteer themselves to particular jobs?
I believe there are sites for it. But, how about points being given for each job actually done?
What if people can compete for max points in a time? and the winner gets a prize from a company which wants to 'encourage' good stuff for their own marketing purposes or whatever? (the prize gotta be a 'bonus' not the main attraction, otherwise it may not fly in the long run, hmm.. or who knows)
Would that result in more people doing more volunteering stuff?
A platform like facebook can easily implement such stuff, probably. and get some 'good' rub off too
"yeah, the market is limited to those who have already discovered the gains in productivity by using multiple screens and are addicted to screen space"
or
"Well there is research that supports that increased screen space increases productivity and reduces fatigue, now its a matter of people discovering it because of an affordable and light enough as a magazine solution"
if the same miniaturization technologies as Ipad were used, wouldn't the 15" have a lesser weight/unit screen area, when the computing electronics/battery components are removed?
Or for that matter another pure screen gadget the same size as Ipad, it would be lot lighter than the ipad itself. wouldn't it be?