As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’ve started actively playing World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG). It has been a rewarding experience, going far beyond the entertainment value. Now, I’m not kidding myself. I play Warcraft because it’s fun. It’s taking time away from watching TV, reading books, and other entertainment pursuits. But I’m also playing because I believe MMOGs will be one of the primary ...

Yesterday, I helped judge the Wharton business case competition. This is a program put on by the Wharton Technology Club, in which MBA students analyze a business problem presented by a real company. This year’s sponsor was Lucent, which asked the students to recommend a strategic initiative for the company. Several Lucent executives also served as judges.

This won’t just happen in Europe.

Marc Canter reports that 45% of eBay’s listings come through its APIs. eBay, Amazon, and Google: three mega-success stories of the dotcom era. What do they have in common? All of them aggressively open up their technical interfaces, allowing other sites to plug into them, or projecting themselves out to the rest of the Web. This supports the argument I outlined seven years ago in a Harvard Business Review article ...

On Friday, I attended the 5th TechCrunch meetup and Naked Conversations launch party in Silicon Valley. It was a pretty crazy scene: 200-300 Internet entrepreneurs stuffed into the back yard and living room of Mike Arrington’s house. I was pretty thrilled when we partnered with Mike and TechCrunch for this year’s Supernova. We’re already getting good submissions for the Connected Innovators showcase, and I expect plenty more before the April ...

This Thursday night, I’m hosting a pre-pre-Supernova party in San Francisco. Come hang out and network with a collection of technology innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, thinkers, and others. It will be at Cha-Am Thai, near the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Full details and RSVP information are at: http://www.socialtext.net/snparty Feel free to invite friends. However, we do have a cap on space. So if you’d like to come, please be sure ...

I just noticed that I sent 5959 outbound email messages in 2005. That’s down about 7% from the year before, and substantially below my all-time high of 7300+ in 2001. This is just personal messages typed into my email client, not broadcast invitations or promotional announcements. Funny, I don’t think I’m cutting down on my email actitivity. Although I wonder if the proliferation of spam, and the growth of other ...

The US Senate held a hearing yesterday on network neutrality. As expected, most Senators supported the idea in theory, but there is little sentiment for any legislation that significantly restricts broadband operators’ flexibility. I still maintain that, although we academics still have some things left to say, as a political matter, the real battle is over.

So Vonage, the leading hardware-based consumer VOIP company, is going public. Not a surprise whatsoever — it was just a question of when Vonage would file. It will be very interesting to see how the IPO does. Vonage has been raising and spending money like a drunken sailor, hell-bent on growing its customer base. It’s a classic Web 1.0 land-grab play. There is no doubt that Vonage has a real ...

President Bush’s new budget proposal includes a provision authorizing the FCC to impose “user fees” on unlicensed wireless. This is a dangerous idea, clearly pushed by incumbent licensed wireless operators to dampen competition from innovative new approaches.