I love to bake. I’m always looking for new ideas, so I spend quite a bit of time on the web browsing various cooking sites. There are zillions of sites on the web that provide free access to recipes. (I just performed a Google search on “free recipes” and got almost 36 million hits). But what I particularly like is the sites that allow readers to rate and comment on the recipes. The rating and comments are valuable to me because they let me know which recipes I shouldn’t bother with and how to improve the recipes I would like to try.

A recent NYT article, ‘Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global” by Hiroko Tabuchi, presents a dichotomy in the Japanese cellphone market: while the technology is extremely advanced, the market has evolved in such a way as to effectively isolate the Japanese market from the rest of the world. This will become increasingly problematic for Japanese suppliers (of both hardware and software/content/services), since the Japanese market is shrinking.

I read an interesting article from the NYT, “Collaborating for Profits in Nanotechnology” by James Flanigan. The article explains that

… nanotechnology companies do not produce finished products in any one industry. Rather, nano particles improve performance and open new possibilities in activities as varied as water purification, biomedicine, battery power, environmental repair and agriculture.

The latest battle in the Smartphone Wars was won by Apple, who blocked users of the Palm Pre from being able to access iTunes. Since Apple makes a profit on every sale from iTunes, why would Apple want to cut off the potential profit source associated with Palm Pre users buying content on iTunes?