Anyone with the remotest interest in ICT development will have noticed the battle raging at the "bottom of the pyramid," where competing initiatives have been vying for the hearts, minds, and dollars of schoolchildren and education ministries the developing world over. This particular battle is being largely fought by Intel and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), once partners but now sparring in opposite corners after months of wrangling led to an acrimonious split earlier this year.

Both companies believe that portable computing is the answer to addressing the digital divide and are willing to go as far as building low-cost laptops by the millions to prove it. OLPC first publicly announced its intentions in January 2005, when Nicholas Negroponte showed a simple, non-functioning mock-up of his XO device (also known as the $100 laptop) at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Intel presented a working version of its Eduwise laptop (also known as the Classmate) at the World Congress on Information Technology in Texas a year and a half later. A few months earlier, Kofi Annan famously broke the charging handle of the first iteration of OLPC during a press conference at the World Symposium on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia. It wasn't until the end of 2006 that the first OLPC laptops (albeit in beta and with a redesigned Kofi-proof charging handle) began rolling off the production lines.

High-profile initiatives such as these were unlikely to live in harmony for long, and sparks finally began to fly in May 2007, when Negroponte accused Intel of telling tales and frustrating and undermining the OLPC's work. Both sides traded words for two months until, in an amazing turnaround, they announced that they were to join forces in July. Intel became the latest arrival on the OLPC board, sitting alongside eleven other OLPC partners, a move that signaled both sides were willing to put their differences behind them and work together. Significantly, however, Intel continued work on its own laptop until OLPC -- according to Intel -- decided several months later that there was too much of a conflict of interest and demanded it drop the Classmate. For a project with the personal backing of the Intel chairman, this was never going to happen. It didn't.

There's no reason why the two initiatives couldn't have lived together, but -- as is often the case -- a mixture of economics, politics, competition, opinions, ego, and jealously led us to where we are today. For some, OLPC doesn't stand a realistic chance against one of the industry's biggest hitters, while for others, their earlier decision not to offer a commercial version of the XO hurt them badly, as did their failure to hit their publicized $100 price tag. To add insult to injury, one of the hottest topics among the XO community right now is whether a Windows XP-driven XO would be a good idea. For a computing device built proudly on open standards, this is a pretty fundamental question.

What happened between Intel and OLPC is more commonplace than you'd expect. The difference here is that, thanks to an incessant demand for round-by-round updates and a very active blogging community, things have been largely played out in public. Ironically, if both initiatives went head-to-head in a commercial environment, we'd see it as healthy competition. Darwinian Law would apply, with the better product winning through and the inferior one forced to adapt or die. But this was never really a level playing field, let alone two commercial outfits vying for market share and acceptable levels of profitability. Unlike Intel, OLPC is a non-profit entity with a single, simple social mission. According to its Web site:

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end -- an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community

Intel, on the other hand, is clearly a for-profit entity, and a highly successful one at that. However, its "World Ahead Program" -- where the Classmate resides -- falls under its Education Initiative, which is funded by the Intel Foundation and Intel. According to its Web site:

The Intel World Ahead Program aims to enhance lives by accelerating access to uncompromised technology for everyone, everywhere. Focused on developing communities, it integrates and extends our efforts to use technology to help people improve their lives, societies, and economies

Not a million miles apart, are they? Although the two initiatives have things in common, it's the differences that have sadly emerged dominant. In one corner is OLPC, the new kid on the block, the non-profit organization building a product on open standards, talking in the hundreds of thousands (minimum orders stand at 250,000 units). In the other corner we have Intel, the pioneering for-profit company building a machine based on proprietary technologies, talking about orders in the thousands (although it admits the need to sell literally millions of these things if it's to work).

Of course, children in Nigeria or Uruguay doesn't particularly care where their laptop comes from, what principles were applied in its design or development or who's right or wrong in the "battle of the paradigms." All they want is an education, ideally aided by the occasional brush with computer technology in some shape or form.

Sometimes, we just need to remind ourselves of the bigger picture. And it doesn't get much bigger than this, whichever corner you're standing in.

Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, specializes in the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world. He combines over 22 years in IT with over 14 years experience living and working throughout Africa in countries including Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Mozambique, Cameroon, Zambia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. His vision is to empower others to create social change, and he does this by developing and providing tools to mostly grassroots organizations that seek to better use technology in their work.

Steven Spielberg knows a thing or two about action games. He advised on the development of the Medal of Honor series, based on his film Saving Private Ryan, and he claims to be on his second play-through of the processor-punishing PC title Crysis. So it's a bit surprising to learn that for his first venture as a videogame creative director, the man behind Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park is making not a photorealistic shooter but a cross between Tetris and Jenga. It all goes back to when he was a kid, Spielberg says. He'd spend hours setting up his electric trains so that the locomotives would crash into one another. Now, with the help of a design team at Electronic Arts, Spielberg hopes to recapture that spirit of creative destruction in Boom Blox, out in May.

Inspired by a Wii tennis session, the auteur got the idea of combining Nintendo's innovative Wiimote motion-sensing controller with his youthful delight in mayhem. In the first few levels, you hurl balls at a pile of blocks. The aim? To knock it down. But it's not just mindless destruction — you have to think strategically about which blocks to take out in order to bring the whole stack down quickly. "When you pick up that Wiimote and start bashing stuff, it satisfies something primal," says Amir Rahimi, the game's senior producer. Game | Life: Episode Twelve: In this week's episode, Steven Spielberg makes a foray into the game business with Boom Blox, and Chris Kohler reviews Mario Kart Wii. For more, visit video.wired.com.

Spielberg didn't just hand off a high concept and then disengage. "He weighed in on everything from the look of the characters and environments to the way the balls move through the air to the different game modes," Rahimi says.

One of those modes challenges players to extract blocks from a complex tower without the whole thing collapsing. Basically, it's Jenga — except that in this digitized version, the buildings are inhabited by cute little creatures. That detail was 100 percent Spielberg. "We were on the path of creating a very generic puzzle game," Rahimi says. "He brought in the idea of having characters you interact with to give it an emotional wrapper."

If the game is as fun as it looks, it may go some way toward erasing those unpleasant memories of the 1983 E.T. game for Atari 2600.

With Google's recent launch of its App Engine, and with the likes of IBM and Amazon having staked claims, cloud computing is clearly a major development in the IT landscape. The benefits are obvious, enabling enterprises to scale rapidly with a level of performance previously available to only the largest companies -- all without adding equipment, software, or staff.

It's early in the game -- consistent definitions aren't even agreed upon in the industry. Is utility computing really in the cloud? What about managed services? The major companies in the category will certainly drive the definition of cloud computing. But as usual, expect start-up companies to disrupt it.

So far, the market entrants have played to their strengths. Amazon is leveraging its tremendous computing capabilities by providing customers with a virtual computing environment via EC2.  Salesforce  is riding its SaaS (software-as-a-service) wave with Force.com -- dubbing it "platform-as-a-service" -- giving developers tools for creating business applications on-demand and without software. Pile on offerings from Sun, Yahoo, Ariba and more, all doing what they do best.

That still leaves plenty of room on the field for start-ups to do something different, which is what they do best. Unlike slow-moving market leaders, early-stage companies have the uncanny ability to identify beachheads adjacent to the market opportunities being established by the big boys. And more than that, they know how to move fast, growing right along with the niche market need they've chosen to address, turning that into a legitimate market that, in retrospect, looks obvious to everyone else. So what might be those beachheads in cloud computing?

To find their entry point, entrepreneurs will first need to determine what, in the enterprise infrastructure, can be cleaved off, or outsourced -- something the other players are not addressing yet. Cloud computing start-ups should work to find enterprise computing requirements that meet the following criteria:

* Computing needs that are not core to the business but are still required to support it. By that token, any enterprise computing requirement that relies on IT time, energy, and budget for such processing needs as algorithms, heavy analytics, and the like is one that enterprises would be likely to hand off to a vendor. For example, a financial institution calculating portfolio risk or an enterprise trying to understand the optimal marketing mix for a campaign by using statistical and simulation analyses could benefit from a cloud computing model.

* A cyclical business that has predictable spikes. Certain businesses that can predict their busy seasons with great accuracy would greatly benefit from a cloud computing model that allows them to scale up processing power only when they need it. An online retailer that sells gift items probably only exceeds capacity in the holiday season. An entertainment content Web site can predict demand for download bandwidth will increase with the video release of popular movies. These are the kinds of businesses that could benefit from overflow provisioning offered by a cloud computing start-up.

* A company where a business buyer is eager to bypass the IT department. CRM was revolutionized by SaaS because suddenly a sales or marketing executive could make a purchasing decision, entirely avoiding the IT department. Just as on-demand software is sold into the enterprise to meet a business need, cloud computing represents an opportunity for a business computing need to be met outside of the enterprise. To stay competitive, enterprises need to launch new services or initiatives quickly but IT often slows the process down due to the multiple demands on their time. A business buyer could be up and running much faster by buying directly from a start-up offering the capability.

Sounds easy, right? Not so fast. Startups with a good go-to-market strategy still need to find their market. To be successful in cloud computing, especially to gain first-mover advantage, small companies need to prove they have broad market applicability -- and specifically -- customers who are willing to pay. Proof will be found not in the small-to-medium business  market; it has to be gained in the enterprise market. If start-ups can't scale up with the capabilities, reliability and redundancy a large enterprise requires then they're just playing on a cost basis rather than bringing about business transformation. And if they can't find a high-margin sales model, they run the risk of losing to more capital-rich competitors. The real challenge for start-ups is that they must find a way to prove their case before burning up their cash.

Technology will continue to trend in favor of entrepreneurs interested in pursuing these opportunities. Bandwidth is becoming less expensive and networking infrastructure is increasingly efficient, making it much more realistic for enterprises to outsource infrastructure or processing without as much latency. And that will only improve over time.

Big companies -- even market leaders -- take a long time to turn the boat; they always have and they always will. Visionary entrepreneurs who understand the complex computing requirements of the enterprise are in a unique position to sail out ahead of the behemoths. First movers are going to be able to grow their businesses more rapidly, gaining more sustainable, higher valuations that will open up opportunities down the road for acquisitions or public offerings.

What sounds like pie-in-the-sky today just may be the cloud computing leader of tomorrow.

Elefant is a founding partner of Opus Capital focusing primarily on Internet and software investments. Previously, he was a senior associate at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures, and director of international sales and marketing at Radius.

Sun Microsystems officials on Monday acknowledged issues the company has had to deal with in offering products such as the OpenSolaris OS and Java via an open source business model.

Morning events at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco featured reflections on the company's open source efforts, including the official rollout of the OpenSolaris version of the Solaris OS. Sun, said Rich Green, the company's executive vice president of software, is the world's largest open source company. But there have been bumps in the company's open source path, company officials recognized.

"I'm here to say that we've learned a lot about what to do and what not to do over the last several years," said Ian Murdock, Sun vice president of developer and community marketing and former CTO of the Linux Foundation. Sun has even made a few mistakes, Murdock said.

Asked afterward which mistakes he was referring to, Murdock cited Sun's brush with controversy in establishing a separate community around the OpenSolaris Image Packaging System (IPS). The system simplifies installation and integration with third-party systems. Murdock then characterized the ordeal as more of a transition than a mistake.

Sun is doing open source in a scale that has never been done before, he said.

Sun also had to cope with unrealistic expectations about how much time it would take to offer Java via open source under the GNU General Public License Version 2.0, a move made in November 2006.

"There was the expectation that it would be immediately carried into the universe," Green said. But it has taken time to free up the bits and pieces of Java to make it available via open source, Green acknowledged.

Now, the Ubuntu Linux distribution includes OpenJDK, featuring open source Java, Green noted. This move announced last week means the open-sourcing is complete, he said.

Pondering the potential clash between open source and business interests, Marten Mickos, senior vice president of the Sun database group and former CEO of recent Sun acquisition MySQL, cited how some extensions to MySQL have not been made available to everyone.

For example, the company does not give away its MySQL Enterprise Monitor service, which helps diagnose and manage the database. "This is a tool that we give to paying customers only," said Mickos. But the MySQL database is and always shall be free and open source, he said.

Sprint Nextel is looking at selling or spinning off its Nextel unit, after acquiring it less than three years ago, according to a news report.

Sprint, which closed its merger with Nextel in August 2005, is looking at several options, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Cyren Call, a company founded by Nextel founder Morgan O'Brien, is looking for investors to acquire Nextel as part of its efforts to provide a wireless network for public safety agencies, such as police and fire departments, the Journal report said.

In recent months, Cyren Call has served as an advisor to the Public Safety Spectrum Trust, a nonprofit group of public safety agencies that was awarded 10MHz of wireless spectrum in the 700MHz band by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Spokespeople for Sprint and Cyren Call weren't immediately available for comment.

The $35 billion merger deal that closed in 2005 created a company with about 44 million mobile subscribers. But the company has posted lackluster financial results, and there's been speculation that Deutsche Telekom is interested in buying Sprint.

Sprint in February reported net revenue of $9.8 billion for the fourth quarter of 2007, down from $10.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006. The company's net loss for the quarter was $29.5 billion, compared to a net income of $261 million a year earlier.

The company is scheduled to report its first quarter 2008 numbers May 12.

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No Microhoo? Shareholders of Yahoo are clearly unhappy.

Shares of Yahoo fell as much as 19 percent in early trading Monday, to a little more than $23, although still above the level they were at before Microsoft disclosed its $31-per-share offer on January 31.

"The only question is whether this is really the bottom," says Eric Savitz on the Tech Trader Daily blog.

In lowering his rating on Yahoo shares to "sell," Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup, wonders why a deal was not forged. Noting that a price of $35-per-share (the midpoint between $33 and $37) amounted to only $3 billion, or 7 percent of the initial bid, "it's surprising that a 7 percent solution couldn't be found."

Henry Blodget on Silicon Alley Insider, says, "Despite Yahoo's suggestion to the contrary, we have yet to hear from a single Yahoo shareholder who publicly supports Yahoo's board's decision to hold fast at $37."

Yahoo shares have not been at $37 since January 2006.

Kara Swisher on All Things Digital says that some top Yahoo executives are also dismayed that merger discussions collapsed over the weekend.

In particular, the description in the New York Times that some Yahoo executives "were high-fiving each other for defeating Microsoft's bid," caused consternation.

"That was very telling, if it was true," one executive told Swisher. "It shows a complete lack of connection to the balance of the company."

The proposed merger had drawn its share of critics, who charged that integration and cultural issues would outweigh potential benefits from combining the two. But now that the deal won't happen, the outlook for both companies is as dire as it was three months ago, before the merger was proposed.

"Without Yahoo, Microsoft has no compelling means of becoming the No. 2 player in online advertising," said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Collins Stewart. "And without Microsoft, Yahoo has no magic wand to lift its stock back above the mid-20s."

This much is certain: Yahoo's stock will take a hard tumble this week as arbitrageurs and others counting on a Microsoft buyout relinquish their shares at a steep discount to last week's levels. "The word crater comes to mind," said Rob Enderle, president of tech advisory firm Enderle Group.

Yahoo had already been facing at least one shareholder lawsuit after it refused to accept Microsoft's proposal. It's likely to face more lawsuits, as well as other pressure from activist investors.

One of them, Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital, is urging Yahoo shareholders to vote against all of the company's board members when they are up for election later this year. Jackson says that he's started hearing from more Yahoo shareholders since Microsoft dropped its bid.

"They're surprised and extremely frustrated," Jackson said. "They were certain a friendly deal was going to happen."

To appease those shareholders, Yahoo needs to improve its financial performance dramatically. The company unveiled a plan in March showing how a new search technology and an open-source approach to software development would help boost its revenue and cash flow. But analysts and investors have signaled that they aren't impressed.

The best short-term hope for Yahoo to increase its cash flow is to ally itself with the very company that has put it in dire straits—Google. Yahoo and Google may enter into a limited ad partnership that will run Google ads on keywords where Yahoo makes less money.

That could help bring Yahoo new revenue in coming quarters. But it could also drive away advertisers who are on Yahoo precisely because its search engine, which is significantly less popular than Google's, charges less for keywords.

Shares of Microsoft are up nearly 3 percent today, and its stock will likely fare much better in the near term. But longer-term threats to its profit growth remain. Vista software sales are slowing; Apple is gaining market share in desktops and laptops; and Google is pushing free versions of office-productivity software, threatening Microsoft Office's cash cow.

Microsoft has invested heavily in online advertising, only to see its share of the search market—like Yahoo's—decline steadily. The division that includes Microsoft's online-ad business has posted steadily growing operating losses for nine straight quarters. In aggregate, it's racked up $1.7 billion in losses since early 2006.

Such pressures drove Microsoft to pursue Yahoo. The $31-a-share bid that Microsoft made in February offered a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's stock price at the time. But it also discounted 32 percent off the $41-a-share bid that Microsoft had previously made for Yahoo, a bid that was also rebuffed by Yahoo's board.

Last week, Microsoft raised its offer to $33 a share, but Yahoo's board held out for $37.

"I think Yahoo misread Microsoft," said Enderle. "People usually bid low and then raise their bids. But Microsoft didn't want talks to drag on, so its strategy was to get the deal done as quickly as possible." Yahoo, however, sensed that protracted talks could strengthen its hand, and so it held firm to a higher bid. "Yahoo thought Microsoft was lowballing it," Enderle said, "and they missed the boat."

So, like Yahoo, Microsoft must now scramble. Ballmer has outlined other possible acquisitions it could make if the Yahoo deal fell through: Facebook, Time Warner's AOL, and News Corp.'s MySpace. Facebook is also determined to remain independent, while AOL has talked with Yahoo about a deal. That leaves MySpace as the easiest partner for Microsoft.

Or Microsoft could simply bide its time and come back to Yahoo after its shareholders start screaming. In doing so, it would follow Larry Ellison's playbook in Oracle's acquisition of BEA Systems. Oracle walked away from BEA after its bid was rejected, then talked a lot about how hard it pushed for its bid. Once BEA investors complained, Oracle bought BEA at a lower price.

"Microsoft can come back again," said Aggarwal, "especially if Yahoo doesn't do very well on its own."

T-Mobile launched its first 3G network, in New York, but customers can't yet use the fastest speeds that the network offers.

Customers can use phones that will let them download data at UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) speeds of as fast as 384Kbps. While the network supports HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), which offers download speeds of around 1Mbps, T-Mobile doesn't have any handsets yet that are compatible with the network. The operator said it plans to offer its first HSDPA device "in the coming months."

While Cingular Wireless, now AT&T, began selling HSDPA phones in mid-2006, T-Mobile can't offer customers those phones because the operators' networks use different spectrum. That means handset manufacturers must tweak their HSDPA phones that were designed for other operators to work on T-Mobile's network.

T-Mobile has already been selling four phones that will work on the UMTS network. They include Nokia's 6263 and 3555 and Samsung's t639 and t819.

T-Mobile plans to roll out its 3G network in the top 20 to 25 markets by the end of the year.

Rather than jump into 3G at the same time as its competitors, T-Mobile has focused on offering Wi-Fi hotspot services. In its announcement about the New York 3G launch, T-Mobile reassured customers that it will continue to build out its hotspot network. It currently has nearly 9,000 hotspots in the U.S.

T-Mobile also offers a service that lets customers use a combined Wi-Fi and cellular phone. Customers can use the phone to make and receive voice calls in their homes over a Wi-Fi connection. Using Wi-Fi for calls may offer a higher-quality service than trying to make calls indoors over the wide area cellular network.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has launched an investigation of 14 companies importing PC power supplies into the U.S. following a complaint by two companies that the imported hardware violates their patents.

Computer maker Ultra Products of Fletcher, Ohio, and parent company Systemax of Port Washington, N.Y., filed the patent complaint with the ITC on April 4. The two U.S. companies have asked the ITC to bar 14 companies, including Coolmax Technology, Enermax Technology, and Aerocool Advanced Technologies, all based in Taiwan, from importing some PC power supplies into the U.S.

In their complaint, Systemax and Ultra Products say they have a patent on PC power supplies that provide internal electric power to the computer and external power to other computer-related devices such as printers and speakers. Systemax operates computer hardware retailer TigerDirect.com, and in January, the company agreed to buy the CompUSA brand, trademarks, e-commerce business, and up to 16 retail outlets.

TigerDirect co-founder Carl Fiorentino received the patent in September 2004. He assigned the patent to Ultra Products in 2006, according to papers filed by Ultra Products and Systemax.

The ITC case will be referred to an administrative law judge, who will schedule and hold an evidentiary hearing. The judge will make an initial determination whether there is a violation of section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. That initial determination is subject to commission review.

The ITC will make a final determination in the investigation at the earliest possible time, the commission said. Within 45 days, the ITC will set a target date for completing the investigation.

Google has asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to obtain a pledge from Verizon Wireless that it will honor the open-access conditions on a band of 700MHz spectrum before selling the spectrum to the carrier.

Google, in a filing with the FCC Friday, raised concerns that Verizon Wireless wasn't committed to the open-access rules the FCC put on the nationwide C block of the 700MHz spectrum the agency sold in an auction ending in mid-March. The FCC's open-access rules required the winner of the C block to allow customers to connect wireless devices of their choosing and run any applications on the network using the C block.

Google's filing doesn't explicitly spell out what the company wants the FCC to do if Verizon doesn't pledge to follow the open-access rules, but it implies that the FCC shouldn't sell Verizon the spectrum in that case.

Before the auction started in late January, Verizon Wireless opposed the open-access rules, Google's lawyers wrote in the FCC filing.

A Verizon official in October talked about a two-tier system in the C block, where Verizon could continue to sell locked wireless devices in addition to allowing outside devices that accepted applications of the customer's choosing, Google's lawyers noted. Verizon, in a filing to the FCC, also said the commission could not force the C-block winner to allow all applications on the network, the Google filing says.

In addition, Verizon filed a lawsuit in September an attempt to force the FCC to abandon the open-access rules, the Google filing notes. Although Verizon later dropped the lawsuit, mobile phone trade group CTIA, which counts Verizon among its members, has a pending lawsuit against the open-access rules.

"Verizon is not free to self-define the rule to exclude any and all Verizon devices," Google's lawyers wrote. "The commission must ensure that Verizon understands that this license obligation means what it says: any apps, any devices."

In November, Verizon Wireless announced an open network initiative for all of its current spectrum. The company plans to allow outside wireless devices to connect to its mobile network by the end of 2008.

Verizon and Google spokespeople were not immediately available for comment on the Google filing.

Verizon's open development initiative is "alive and well," Verizon said. "We will continue to provide even details on our open development programs as we continue to make progress," the company said. "Google's filing has no legal standing."

Google, along with several consumer groups, pushed for the open-access rules in the auction for the 700MHz band, which many wireless experts see as spectrum that's suited for long-range wireless broadband services. Google pledged to bid at least $4.6 billion on the C block, but the company lost to Verizon's $4.7 billion bid.

Google asked the FCC to act quickly to get an open-access pledge from Verizon.

"Action now is especially necessary given the long lead time typically required for software applications developers and device manufacturers to design, develop, and deploy their products to the public, as well as the uncertainty Verizon has introduced publicly regarding its compliance with the open access obligations," Google's lawyers wrote.

This story was updated on May 5, 2008