Skyway West Recommended March 25th to April 1st

Each Monday we’ll pass on links to articles we thought were well worth reading from the previous week, kind of a Digg-lite for those who live where we do (British Columbia, Canada), work like we do (high speed business internet), and think like we do (internet trends, internet privacy, cutting-edge technology, etc.). If you don’t want to wait ’til Monday, we usually tweet and link to these as we come across them…

New York Times: Factual: Gathering the Data Universe

AT 7 years old, Gilad Elbaz wrote, “I want to be a rich mathematician and very smart.” That, he figured, would help him “discover things like time machines, robots and machines that can answer any question.” In the 34 years since, Mr. Elbaz has accomplished big chunks of these goals. He has built Web-traversing software robots and answered some very big questions for Google, along the way becoming a millionaire several hundred times over. His time-machine plans, however, have been ditched for something he finds more important: trying to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual. Read More…

 Irish Times: Giant Telcos Poised to Inherit the Keys to the Internet

IN TORONTO THIS week, I sat with what they like to call “multiple stakeholders” and we talked about the future of the internet, as you do. It was called a Cyberdialogue, kindly hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and what we concentrated on was the topic of the “stewardship of cyberspace” – which is to say, who exactly should be making sure that the internet should continue to work and, well, not implode, potentially taking our civilisation with it. Read More…

IT World Canada: The Angry Birds Lesson for Mobile Apps

Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served on a smart phone. After the hugely successful launch of Angry Birds Space recently, every IT department should stop playing it (for a minute) and ask themselves what makes the game so addictive and how they could begin to tailor their own mobile enterprise applications to adopt a similar approach. Read More…