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!!!!!!!
You should actually be rooting for telco competition. Look at areas where Verizon FIOS and Comcast compete head-to-head. Not only is the broadband excellent quality, it's price competitive with almost any other European/East Asian nation.
There's no doubt in my mind that the U.S. can have excellent broadband at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, in most areas we only have the choice between pricy, midgrade cable internet and cheap, slow DSL.
I'm rooting for all competition; I don't have any reason to believe that telcos would be any less corrupt than cable companies. But if we had a choice between multiple wireless providers, multiple cable providers, and multiple telcos, we might stand a chance at a fair deal.
The Cable/Telco-FIOS spar is likely to evolve into a wink-and-nod conspiracy where companies all settle on similar high prices and compete only in the marketing arena (see SMS as one easy example).
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.
