I have a rule about business meetings. When someone’s elevator pitch includes the explanatory phrase, “We’re going to be Google (GOOG) for __________.” I always respond by asking, “What are you going to do when Google decides to become Google for ___________?” Invariably the pitch-person quickly answers, “Google’s not going into this, it’s not their business model.”

You know, that conversation always makes me smile and, truthfully, it never gets old. One of my favorite versions of this dialog is the, “We’re going to be Google for Music” pitch. (I hear this almost as often as, “We’ve built a better iTunes.” But that’s for a different column.)

Turner threw a party the other night and they had good reason to celebrate. The CNN.com Web site you are going to experience on Monday, October 26th is going to make you smile. If you’re a heavy CNN.com user, you’re going love it. If you are a casual user, you are going to love it. Actually, no matter who you are, if you visit the site with the goal of being informed, enlightened and entertained, you’re going to love it.

It’s pretty. But that is not why it’s great.

On Monday, September 21, 2009, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski outlined the concrete actions he believes the Commission must take to preserve the free and open Internet. He said, “The Internet is an extraordinary platform for innovation, job creation, investment, and opportunity. It has unleashed the potential of entrepreneurs and enabled the launch and growth of small businesses across America. It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet.”

The commissioner presented six principles that we might use to craft these new rules:

It seems that Twitter, Facebook and even LiveJournal were victims of DoS (denial-of-service) attacks this past week. Actually, DoS attacks are a daily occurrence in the information age. This one got some headlines because Twitter is the site de jour.

As most of you know, I am not an iPhone lover. I bought my first one right when they came out and, then, immediately brought it back to the genius bar to ask why the speakers didn’t work. My iPhone version 1.0 story is chronicled in two articles from July 2007. The first July 7, 2007 was a love letter entitled, “iLove my iPhone,” which is mostly about my first impressions. The second, written on July 21, 2007, was “iPhone Reality/Sanity Check — my iWish list,” which is just what it says it is.

By September 2007 (see iPhone Aftermath) I’d had enough fun with my iPhone and I purchased a Verizon (VZ) BlackBerry World, which was actually my least favorite of the BlackBerry family, but it worked as designed. The moment Verizon offered the BlackBerry Curve, I was in the store. It is what I carry today and it works exactly as designed. Although, I won’t miss it at all.

Television, the platform, is having a bad year. There are lots of reasons: the economy, consumer control, audience fragmentation / atomization, etc. On the other hand, Television, the art form, is alive and well with more (albeit different kinds of) projects in production than at any time in history.

That being said, the long-term viability of big budget television is the cause of much angst. If audiences continue to atomize, can any given show make enough money to justify producing it? If consumers continue to transcode things they want to watch, edit out the commercials and make them available for free over the public Internet, will sponsors be willing to pay? If the most popular productions are the most pirated productions, is there any real future in production? Can free, advertiser-supported, Internet television continue with a fraction of the advertising avails and audiences of its broadcast counterpart?

This past week the first of America’s major metropolitan newspapers has made the decision to cease print operations and transform itself into an online only news organization. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer RIP, long live www.seattlepi.com — if only it could be true.

If you’re interested in the details, you can read a very thorough article in the WSJ by Shria Ovide. Essentially, advertising revenue is down, the paper is losing over $14 million annually and Hearst is pulling the plug.

(Excerpted from my upcoming book Get Digital: Reinventing Yourself and Your Career for the 21st Century Economy)

For the first time in decades, people who have “made it” are in serious financial trouble. It’s easy to blame the current economic conditions. After all, even the biggest, most trusted corporate entities are collapsing.

As I listened to President-elect Obama’s speech the other day, I was tickled that he chose this moment to promote my upcoming book, Get Digital: Reinventing yourself and your career for the 21st Century Economy (2009, Lake House Press). Actually, he wasn’t promoting my book, he was articulating some of his thoughts about how digital infrastructure (among other things) is a central focus of his economic stimulus package and his vision of a 21st century economy. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that he is seriously considering bowing to special interest (and political) pressure and delaying the February 17, 2009 switch-off of analog television — one of the fundamental building blocks of the technological future he envisions. On some level, a delay makes sense. He is facing the biggest economic crisis we’ve ever seen and there is a very real threat of a protracted war in the Middle East. This probably isn’t the time to take the risk of not being able to reach 8ish million antenna-only television households. On the other hand, there will never be a "good" time to force people to make a change. At this point, any date they pick will be arbitrary.

It’s official; we’re in a recession. Which is incredibly bad news to get at the opening of the holiday shopping season. Not that anyone needed the National Bureau of Economic Research (the private organization charged with making such determinations) to tell us that times are tough. We all know it too well. No matter what business you’re in, you have to be feeling the pressure. Retail is no exception.

On Black Friday retailers were practically giving away goods in order to get consumers into stores. In fact, that morning, when a Wal-Mart employee was literally trampled to death by bargain-hunting consumers, pundits and psychologists were all over the airwaves espousing theories of mob mentality and blaming the tragedy on the hard economic times.

Two weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled "White Space – A Connected Future" that explored the kind of world we might live in if White Space devices found their way to market. What’s "white space?" On February 17, 2009 American television stations will stop broadcasting in the analog spectrum and broadcast only in digital. In layman’s terms, each station has been assigned certain "channels" for their broadcasts. The unused space between the channels is known as "white space."

Within minutes of its publication, my article incited impassioned engineers, technogeeks and concerned citizens to chastise the hell out of me. I received literally dozens of emails from extremely learned people telling me the same thing in many different ways … White Space will NEVER work!

One important vision of the future of video distribution is the concept of making content available to consumers, WIWWIWWIW, "What I want, where I want, when I want." To accomplish this distribution goal, service providers will have to store content in a central location and transcode (prepare) it for distribution to a plurality of devices.

Just think of the various screen sizes in your world. Cell phone 2 ½" diagonal, PDA 3 ½" diagonal, Video Monitor in the back of the SUV 9" diagonal, laptop 15" diagonal, living room HDTV 42" diagonal, etc. Just making video available in the appropriate resolutions, aspect ratios and sizes for these different devices seems like a big job. It is.

This past week’s election was truly historic, but for technogeeks and future thinkers there was another equally important vote on Tuesday. The FCC voted 5-0 in favor of developing the conditional unlicensed use of white-space television spectrum.

What’s “white space?” On February 17, 2009 American television stations will stop broadcasting in the analog spectrum and broadcast only in digital. In layman’s terms, each station has been assigned certain “channels” for their broadcasts. The unused space between the channels is known as “white space.”

Here’s a knee-slapper: “What did Comcast just say to its broadband customers?” Answer: “250GB of data per month ought to be enough bandwidth for anyone!” Get it? Sorry, it’s an inside joke.

In response to getting busted by the FCC for illegally throttling consumer Internet traffic, Comcast (CMCSA) put a 250GB per billing cycle cap on consumer bandwidth. What does that mean? To exceed the 250GB cap you would need to watch about eight hours of online video every day for a month. Not likely, you say … perhaps.

With the recent collapse of three of five major American financial institutions, a war going into its sixth year, an election that is far from predictable and a housing crisis that has thousands struggling to pay their mortgages, it’s no surprise that Americans are worried about the future.

To make matters worse, the rising cost of oil and the slumping stock market have most of the country on edge. If you aren’t on edge, you must have a nice doctor prescribing overpriced mood-levelers or pain meds — if you are lucky enough to have health insurance.

The first quarter of 2008 was the most successful in Apple’s history. The company boasted revenue of $9.6 billion and a net profit of $1.58 billion, compared to revenue of $7.1 billion and a net profit of $1 billion in the third quarter of 2007. But its second quarter results were down ($7.51 billion in posted revenue and $1.05 billion in net profit) from the first quarter. Some people think this downtick signals the beginning of an unfortunate trend-line … or worse. I hope not. But there is certainly more going on here than meets the eye.

In the eighteen months since Apple dropped Computers from its name, the company has greatly expanded its reach. However, with massive growth have come security flaws, software bugs, faulty hardware and a plethora of other puzzling problems.

DISH Networks (DISH) Q2 profits were up. Unfortunately, 25,000 subscribers went missing. The company blamed the drop in subs on weak economic conditions, aggressive promotional offerings by their competition, the heavy marketing of HD service by their competition, the growth of fiber-based pay TV providers, signal theft and other forms of fraud, and operational inefficiencies at DISH Network - at least, that’s what the 10-Q said.

This is the first time in history that either domestic satellite provider has posted negative subscriber growth so, as you can imagine, the stock got hammered. It was down about seven percent at this writing. I like their excuse. Times are tough. But, I don’t think it’s the whole story.

The headlines read “Amazon Earnings Double” as news of Amazon.com’s (AMZN) quarterly earnings hit the web. This is not true, by the way. The numbers include a one-time boost from the sale of their European DVD rental company… oops. Amazon’s North American sales remained strong growing 35% year over year. As for high fuel costs and the future of free shipping?

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said “Since we offer free shipping and Amazon Prime offers fast free shipping, the burden is upon us to make sure that we can do that in a way that is economical for us, so that customers can continue to enjoy those free shipping offers.” All in all, it was a pretty good earnings report for Amazon and the stock is up about 8% on the news.

In case you haven’t noticed, the business of broadcast television is in trouble. Ratings have been trending down year over year for more than 30 years and there’s no end in sight. Most pundits blame this audience fragmentation on outside forces like the proliferation of cable channels, DVDs, video gaming, DVR’s and most recently online video, personal video and wireless offerings.

People, who should know better, constantly parrot misinterpreted data about the deleterious effect of TiVo (the noun describing the entire genus of DVR’s) on commercial advertising and how the :30 second spot is dead. Others like to call the medium a vapid wasteland of unwatchable programs. All of the professional explanations for the decline of broadcast television ratings seem to agree that the problem comes from outside forces and an unavoidable changing landscape. I disagree.

Consumers have demonstrated a preference for three basic types of online video experiences over the past few months: Video Snacking, Download-to-Own and Online Television. Each of these three consumer behaviors has a specific value chain associated with it. Video Snacks are hard to directly monetize. Download-to-Own files are hard to protect. But, Online Television is, for all intents and purposes, television using the public Internet as the distribution network. And people who have popular content are enjoying excellent financial results from making that content available online.

You can find examples of Internet Television at hulu.com, abc.com, nbc.com, cbs.com, fox.com. In fact, almost every major television network offers some kind of online viewing experience for their most popular shows. Which begs the question, “What does quality online video look like?” Should it look like Standard Definition Television? Should it look like HDTV? Should it have to meet “broadcast quality” standards as a benchmark?