Convergence is now occurring in the collapse of the print newspaper industry with newspapers, if they survive at all, migrate to the Web (e.g., Seattle Post-Intelligencer).
Well, along comes Global Post, started by print-era journalists but with no such baggage. Visit www.globalpost.com and bookmark it for regular visits to see how it develops. (Full disclosure: One of my colleagues in our consulting firm, The Global Capital Strategic Group, advises them but independent of that group.)
GlobalPost is hiring "stringers" (or freelance journalists) around the world ffor a modest stipend, who then post on key issues in other markets. Their coverage is pretty good--part news, part commentary.
For my inaugural blog with the CTC I thought I'd explain my point of view, which is to mix pragmatic idealism with a positive sense of skepticism. And I will do what I can to toss in the international perspective, one frustratingly missing from so many technology discussions in the US.
Huh? What does this mean? Well, I love hearing all the enthusiastic pronouncements of three-screen convergence (which started in, oh, 1994) but I always love to start musing about all the , well, things that seem to act like magnets repelling each other.
Sooo, it is not that my skepticism will be negative, reactionary or contrarian, because I love some of the things either heading down the proverbial pike or already at my offramp (OK, OK, so I couldn't resist extending the metaphor)-like the Amazon Kindle or its soon-to-be competitor(s), among them Plastic Logic. I love the concept of the netbooks but my experience thus far with three of them (one from ASUS and two from Acer) has been less than stellar (read: want to throw them out the window). Still, $200-400 is not bad.
So, speaking of international and therefore travel, let's think about the (non) convergence of what we take on our business trips. I met a guy in the airport and we started to do an inventory of what he had to carry on his trip. It is worth repeating:
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