Stanford started sharing their courses online free just like MIT does with their Oper Course ware. Visit their site for more details.

The initial set of courses includes three course Introduction to Computer Science and more on artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.

I might be interested to check out their material on Computer Science and Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

The Flat-Rate Debate

Easy-to-use services with transparent pricing can only be a good thing for consumers.

By Dominic Smith, Cerillion

Multi-play Bundles

Usage-based Billing

Unprofitable Customers

The problem of course
comes when the average customer is affected by the behavior of the
minority who consume more than their money’s worth – to the detriment
of the majority. The result is that the profitable customers drift
away, only to be replaced by the less desirable customers who
over-consume and are not profitable. Does this sound familiar?
Broadband providers take note.

Transparency

BT’s Billing Transformation Experience

By Jonathan Jensen, Billing Convergence Lead, BT

The move from legacy service stacks to the new is being completed in a number of stages. Initially new customer provisions were switched to the new service stack and customers were billed from the new billing platform. This is being followed by the migration of existing customer accounts from old to new platforms. Where customers have accounts on both the old and new service stacks and the billing and payments methods align, then the accounts are merged to create a single customer account. Where they differ, the accounts are generally kept separate and the customer contacted at a future date to agree on alignment and then merged.

So is Chrome a good idea? A year from now if Google is #3 or better in the browser rankings and Microsoft has lost share, perhaps. But if any of Google’s other major projects have slipped along the way, investors may look at Chrome as just the latest shiny object to distract the search giant.

Google on Google Chrome – comic book

What is Enterprise Web 2.0?

Most technologists segment the Web 2.0 market between “consumer” Web
2.0 technologies and “business” Web 2.0 technologies. So what does
Enterprise 2.0 include then?

Well, what it doesn’t include is consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter,
says Forrester. These types of services are aimed at consumers and are
often supported by ads, so they do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Instead, collaboration and productivity tools based on the concepts
of web 2.0, but designed for the enterprise worker will count as being
Enterprise 2.0. In addition, for-pay services, like those from BEA
Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Awareness, NewsGator Technologies, and Six
Apart will factor in.

Enterprise marketing tools have also expanded to include Web 2.0
technologies. For example, money spent on the creation and syndication
of a Facebook app or a web site/social network widget could be
considered Enterprise 2.0. However, pure ad spending dollars, including
those spent on consumer Web 2.0 sites, will not count

Still Important

• Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) – middleware that enables new component apps
• Business Process Management (BPM) – user-driven automation of manual tasks
• Mobile – beyond laptops to cell phones and PDAs
• X Internet – RFID and sensors at the edge the net connects physical objects to the internet

New Trends CIO Should Care About

1. Technology Populism
2. The Information Workplace
3. Dynamic Business Applications
4. Digital Business Architecture
5. IT Ecosystems
6. Enterprise Master Data Management

Yahoo’s location aware service is now available to public