Yahoo Glee Over Bartz is Over?

1 Billion from virtual goods

1 billion of revenues for virtual goods in 2009 and more than double than last year. Who would have thought? But then who would have thought, looking back, that kids would make their parents pay to collect sticky cards to put in albums?
I still haven't bought a farm on farmville but given the fact that I spend about 5 inutes on it everyday (just to see what it is like of course), and my time being valuable, paying 10$ to get a brand new barn does seem cheap indeed :-)
More details at Venture Beat

Google Wave is out

Supposed to be the next killer app replacing e-mail (yes e-mails are already 20 years old!!!), a blend between instant messaging, google doc, twitter and all the rest of the user-unfriendly project management tools, Google Wave is pre-released and invites are sold on e-bay despite Google's opposition.

* Read at Mediapost and take a first preview look at Lifehacker

Web Squared is the new web2.0

You may have noticed that the web has been changing in the past 1-2 years to become more social, more mobile, more relevant to where you are, who your friends are.

Web 2.0 meant that the web was more flexible, the invention of recommendation engines and of the web 'collective intelligence'.

Now not only is the web "smarter", it also knows a lot more about you: who you are, who your friends are, what you like, what you buy, where you are, where you're going. Although it feels a bit matrixy in the good days (i can't believe my iPhone offers voice recognition when I put it next to my mouth) / big brothery in the bad ones (what if google was becoming evil from one day to the next and used my account, my Google docs, my e-mail messages, my customized maps, to overwhelm me with obnoxious ads), it does open the door to a whole lot of new applications/uses which we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg right now.

For a more in-depth article on what uber-geeks have called WebSquared, read the Forbes article.

WSJ on the Digital Business Model

On charging for content, offering different content on different platforms. From WSJ.
* Read more @ PaidContent