And here's an amazing thing: Even with Apple's size and momentum, there's still plenty of room left for growth. In its most important markets - mobile phones and personal computers - Apple is still being dramatically outsold by competitors.

That in mind, it's also reasonable to ask: How long can Apple keep its streak alive? When will it peak?

First, Let's Look Back

Apple's current growth streak just finished its tenth year.

After a few years of ups-and-downs after Steve Jobs re-joined Apple, 2002 represented its sustained return to growth. That was the first full year of iPod sales, an okay year for the Mac, and Apple brought in $5.8 billion in total sales, up 2% from 2001. (That said, it was still a pretty bad time for the tech and PC industries, following the dot-com bust.)

Since then, Apple has posted full-year revenue growth every year, now for ten years in a row.

In 2011, Apple reported $128 billion in sales, up 68% from 2010 - an accelerating growth rate. The weakest growth years were 2003 (16% growth) and 2009 (20% growth) - two "bad" years that most tech companies would love to have. The last two years have been nothing short of incredible, led by Apple's booming iPhone, iPad, and Mac businesses.

Still an Underdog

The crazy thing is that even considering how big Apple is, it's still a relatively small player in many of its markets, at least measured by unit sales. That is, there's plenty of future growth potential, just by convincing more people to buy Apple versions of the products they're already buying.

In the mobile phone market, for instance, Apple only represented 4% of global phone shipments in the third quarter of 2011, according to Gartner. (Its fourth quarter share will almost certainly be higher, as the iPhone had a huge Christmas, but still probably not more than 8% of the total market.) Rival Nokia, meanwhile, still shipped 24% of the world's phones in the third quarter.

In personal computers, despite record Mac sales over the holidays, Apple wasn't even big enough to make it into Gartner's top five worldwide vendor list. A reasonable estimate is that if you only count Apple's Mac sales, it represented about 6% of the PC market last quarter. If you also include iPads, Apple's share rises to around 19%. But even then, that still means more than 4 of every 5 PCs sold in the world are non-Apple machines.

So Apple's opportunity to keep growing is obvious: All it needs to do is to keep representing a higher share of sales in its key, fast-growing markets - smartphones and tablets. That, combined with new potential growth areas like TVs, should offset its shrinking iPod business and slower-growing Mac business.

But there are two big hurdles/risks that Apple is going to have to deal with:

• Apple is a premium brand, and as much as Apple is defining taste in electronics and teaching more people to want to buy premium products, that's never going to represent 100% of any market. So at some point, Apple's addressable part of any market will hit its limit.


• One of the key things that makes Apple successful is its narrow, deliberate focus, and its relative lack of bloat. Nonstop growth, even under the smartest and most efficient of leaders, challenges those traits.

So, When Will Apple Peak?

Barring economic disaster, it seems Apple is set to maintain yearly sales growth at least through the end of this decade. Its position in its current technology cycle - smartphones and tablets, and perhaps TVs - seems strong enough to suggest that Apple should be able to sell more stuff every year than it did the year before for at least that long. The main risk seems to be Google's Android ecosystem, which will challenge Apple's iOS in seemingly every market. But so far, Apple seems to be fine.

The bigger question is: What comes after that? Can Apple transform its iPhone and iPad into whatever comes after them, the way it morphed the iPod and Mac into its current lineup? And that's where the unknown is simply unknown. It's possible that sometime in the 2020s - if not sooner - Apple will have its first down year since 2001.

Why is this sector so on fire? I presumed it's not just because everyone is suddenly excited about personal professional development, so I asked a few experts in the field. This is what they said.

1. Companies are constrained in their efforts to meet their goals by a shortage of talent in their ranks.
2. They have inadequate means of measuring the impact of their investments in talent optimization.
   
3. They can't identify specific skills gaps well enough.
4. And they can't figure out who works best with teams in a scalable way without software.

I asked a number of different experts in the field and none disagreed with the thoughts above, but most argued that it is more complicated than that.

First, this market has been growing and consolidating quickly for years. Most of the leading vendors getting acquired by enterprise giants grew themselves through years of acquisitions.

Most recently, one company in particular has been pressuring everyone else to scramble to protect their market share: Workday. "Workday is eating Oracle for lunch in HCM," asserts enterprise software blogger Dennis Howlett. "I predict Workday will be a $1 billion business in the 2014-15 timeframe. They have a very good value proposition and solution that is well differentiated from the incumbents."

That all makes sense from a business perspective, but are there culturual and technology trends that are contributing to HCM's hotness?

Jason Averbook, CEO of Knowledge Infusion and the former Senior Director of Human Capital Managment Marketing at PeopleSoft, explains it like this:

"LinkedIn knows more about our employees than we do as CEOs and leaders of organizations," Averbook begins.

"While we work hard to get people paid and give them benefits, we do little to understand their true interests, talents and backgrounds that could help us engage and retain our workforce." This disparity of engagement is almost taunted by a growth in technology-enabled opportunities.

"The world of Software as a Service combined with access to technology in an unlimited number of ways through mobile, broadband, etc creates a major transition for all HR and talent leaders in the world," he says.

Scarcity of skills is a major factor as well. "Many people say we are in a War for Talent, while this is true, it is truly a War for Skills," says Averbook

"We don't have the right skills in the open market to fill the available jobs. The War for Skills is even more deadly than a war for talent because the only place to get the skills is from the competition. We now, more than ever, need to know what we have from a talent standpoint, what our competitors have, what we need and what it will cost to get it. The Knowledge Economy has finally caught up to the Manufacturing Economy in the need for Supply Chain Intelligence, just not of parts but of people and skills.

"We have a workforce that like to collaborate, likes to think differently, is being raised without filter and is open to trying many new things. There are no more career ladders, but hopefully career vision that we can provide the workforce to stay with our organization. This will only get worse as the economy improves."

I first heard about HCM with regard to the retirement of baby boomers, and Averbook cites that still today. "There is nothing we can do about that," he says.

"HR leaders worldwide are losing more people that have been employed by their orgs for the past 20 years than they are gaining new workers. Knowledge is walking out the door and is not replaceable by new talent. This has leaders scared to death and scrambling for what to do about it.

"[Furthermore,] more and more contractors and contingent labor is becoming the norm. This is something that the HR function is not good at measuring and monitoring, and for the most part, have not paid attention to. This trend is also causing this market to boom.

"What has always been seen as a transactional expense in organizations is finally being realized to be a competitive differentiator that is a must to have 'right' to drive an organization forward. Without this, every year an org doesn't act on these issues puts it 3-5 years behind its competition.

"This market is real and will only get hotter. The answer is in retooling HR with new processes and technology to drive true business value, not just transactional excellence."

What does that retooling look like? "HR used to be boring," says Laurie Ruettimann, a leading HCM consultant and Director of Social Media, Principal Strategist at The Starr Conspiracy.

"We hired and fire people. Now every individual step related to screening, hiring, paying, managing, training and firing someone is part of a software package. Data is everywhere. The industry is huge. And the people in charge of HR aren't your grandmother's HR. They are younger, smarter, and better educated. For real."

Employees and hiring are key cost centers, and optimizing the scarce skills of existing employees is a powerful competitive step for businesses to take.

I like to think about personal growth and skill building. I like to think about it from an organizational perspective. I like to think about online services that specialize in doing that kind of work. I think the above are viable explanations of why this sector is so hot. Do you?

Andy Rooney was among the greatest news writers of his generation. But during the latter stages of his life, he complained about how awful life had become, about how things had ceased to be familiar any more, about how disruption had left his world a blur. Rooney's complaints had become emblematic of what has been perceived as the decline of the role of television as an information medium. So when M.G. Siegler spends a few minutes with us in the same vein, complaining about how the object of his career up until recently has been "bulls---," one wonders whether this should be emblematic of the end of something else.

Siegler, by any measure, is one of the more noteworthy bloggers of his generation, still contributing to TechCrunch while working now as an investor in the CrunchFund partnership. Yesterday, Siegler posted a critique of an online article by New York Times reporter Nick Bilton. His subject was a rundown of the unauthorized sharing of iPhone users' address books by Path, and the subsequent apology from Path CEO Dave Morin, which RWW's Jon Mitchell praised as "full of refreshing self-consciousness."

NYT's Bilton was disturbed by the sudden reversal of apparent public sentiment toward Morin, from indignation to outright support, which he credited to savvy public relations, especially toward the "technorati." But along the way, his original story had some inaccuracies which NYT corrected, with its usual addendum.

Writing in his personal Paris Lemon blog, Siegler chastised Bilton for not doing the requisite legwork. Had Bilton taken the time to do more research, Siegler pointed out, he would have discovered that Path is not the only app uploading address books to Apple's servers. "Apps that have been doing it for a long time. That actually would have made his point much stronger," Siegler wrote. "But that would have been more work. And work is hard. Path was served up on a platter, the homework already done."

Had Siegler stopped there, we might have considered this a valuable and important lesson. It has become commonplace for Web journalists and bloggers to acquire a story in its mostly, if not entirely, completed state, add one layer of informativeness or newsiness to it, and pass it along the pike. From there, someone may copy it in part or whole, perhaps adding another layer of commentary. Yes, that's not a particularly ethical way to run a news business.

But Siegler was having a bad day. He had come to the deep, personal revelation that the world of investing into which he had entered, and the world of writing about investors which he has not entirely exited, were - in his words - "not aligned. At all."

"More Bulls--- Than Information"

(Do forgive me for not repeating Siegler's words here verbatim, including several of the Seven Words You Can't Say as compiled by the late genius George Carlin. I know writing in street language is oh-so-Hunter S. Thompson these days, but as both my longtime readers will know, as an editor, I tend to lean more towards Fulton J. Sheen.)

"Most of what is written about the tech world - both in blog form and old school media form - is bulls---," remarks Siegler. "I won't try to put some arbitrary label on it like 80%, but it's a lot. There's more bulls--- than there is 100% pure, legitimate information."

The reason, he reports (in exhaustive detail), is the relentless drive by advertisers for publishers to produce greater page views, which in turn means bloggers devote less time per story, thus reducing the amount of research they're allowed to do to near- or absolute zero. It gets worse. Most tech bloggers don't think, Siegler goes on. He himself pleads guilty as charged, adding that it was impossible to know the full extent of what tech bloggers do not know, until he could step outside the shell and observe them from the outside.

Now he realizes just how many different topics a blogger is expected to be an expert in, simultaneously. "You cannot be an authority on 20 different topics. You just can't," Siegler writes, in what should have been a concluding paragraph but wasn't. "But people are trying to convey that they are. And there's often a perception that they are. And this horribly broken system works from the perspective of the pageview machine."

So here's the problem: Some of us appear to have spent a great deal of our careers disrupting the monster that is mainstream media. In Andy Rooney's day, these were the oracles from which all information flowed in regularly scheduled intervals and in properly proportioned nuggets. Why do people attribute that much authority to a single institution, folks asked?

But now that we have the floor and the spotlight is shining on us - all the myriad individuals who tore down the walls separating the people from open and transparent access to the information they need to live and work - all of a sudden, no one person can be an authority on twenty different things. Now the burden is too hard to bear. We redefined the news business from something about institutions into something about ourselves. We've deconstructed the three or four big silos and built a thousand smaller ones. And we've come to the realization not only of how under-informed we are, but how uninteresting we are to boot.

We Interrupt This Diatribe...

A news service can be an authority on twenty different things, or a hundred, or five hundred. It's already happened, just deep in our past. An institution of reporters working together under established, trusted editorial leadership, sharing their knowledge and collaborating with one another, can and has earned a rightful place of authority in millions of people's lives. Great news broadcasts, newspapers, and newsmagazines about the world and about technology were typically produced by a few dozen people.

It is perhaps the narcissistic nature of this generation that has led people to believe they work better in closets, collaborating to the extent that one can by way of the occasional tweet or IM. Fewer people indeed do generate more content per publication than ever before in history. But as Siegler himself correctly points out, the truth - if and when it ever does become known - is produced through a complex and often random exchange of data from one blogger to the next to the next. When you connect all the various blogs together into one steel-wool-shaped mass, and perceive the product rather than its individual threads as the modern engine of journalism, you realize that far more people are involved today in the production of a complete story than ever before. Each blog publication may act as a subatomic component in the creation of facts, and whatever else accompanies them; the greater molecule of news production is bigger, bulkier, and less efficient than ever before in history. Tens of thousands of people, all ping-ponging hyperlinks in M.G. Siegler's pageview machine.

"I offer no solutions because my honest opinion is that nothing will change where we're headed," the TechCrunch writer closes. Well, okay then. We've had our tantrum, and now we're exhausted and a little embarrassed. Thank you for your input.

My turn now. Journalism is not about being an expert in twenty different things. It's about being interested in all of them, knowing how to ask questions, and how to elicit information from the answers. You do not have to be an expert in anything at all to be a journalist. In fact, your need to know must be more potent than your need to profess what you know. Your methodologies will improve, your insight will be sharpened, your ability to separate fact from filth will be well-honed.

But you can't ask questions and expect answers in a vacuum. First, you have to open the f---tarded closet door and step outside. Breathe some clean air. Then start finding the right people to ask questions of. I strongly suspect it's something M.G. Siegler is yearning to do anyway.

Scott M. Fulton, III is the author of this document, and is fully responsible for his content.

Byte Magazine cover, February 1983, from VintageComputers.net

If only it were that easy.

Writing in Sunday's New York Times, social psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Benjamin R. Karney question claims by dating sites like eHarmony, which promise us happily-ever-after with someone who has been "prescreened for deep compatibility with you across 29 dimensions." And maybe its high time we applied the same degree of skepticism to all the social media prophets promising fail-proof predictions based on close scrutiny of Twitter's API.

"Likewise, dating sites don't take into account the environment surrounding the relationship: factors like job loss, financial strain, infertility and illness," they wrote. "Another major problem with the algorithms of dating sites is that the information that they do collect - about individual characteristics - accounts for only a tiny slice of what makes two people suited for a long-term relationship."

Extending that argument to social media, the lesson is don't believe everything "they" tweet. If you did, Ron Paul would be assured a victory in November's presidential election, Apple's iPhone 4s was a disaster and Jon Bon Jovi is dead. Social media sentiment is one of those things that, when it's right, the degree of accuracy is chilling, but when it's wrong, it can be a very pointed swing-and-a-miss.

I'm endlessly fascinated by the potential of the predicative capabilities of social media sentiment and spend a good chunk of my time at ReadWriteWeb talking to people about it and covering it. I've been particularly interested in talking with people who are looking at the election and the equities markets with social media sentiment, but the quickest way to lose my interest is to tell me that you're analysis is showing an assured victory for candidate X in state primary Y or that Ticker Symbol XYZ is going to see its share price rise, solely because social media chatter about the stock is on the upswing.

The people in the growing field of social media sentiment who are worth listening to are the first to concede that social media doesn't hold all the answers, and that there are other factors to be included in any predictive model.

"None of this suggests that online dating is any worse a method of meeting potential romantic partners than meeting in a bar or on the subway," Finkel and Karney wrote to conclude their op/ed piece. "But it's no better either."

Frankly, it's too soon to tell if analyzing social media sentiment is a better or worse way of predicting what may happen next. And that's the most important factor to keep in mind when someone tells you otherwise.

That could become a valuable tool for hedge funds and investment firms. High volatility often makes it easier for firms to trade stocks. Volatility predictions can also be factored into more comprehensive trading models and better predict whether a stock's price will rise or fall.

"As far back as six or seven days, people's perceptions of a brand matter," Nagle said. "The problem has been that public perception has always taken longer than a buy or sell sentiment to factor into share price."

Nagle's research also shows in certain concentrated industries sentiment about the overall industry may have more of an impact on share price than sentiment about the individual company. He offered the airline industry as an example, where a relatively small number of publicly-traded companies focus on providing one core service. An increases in tweets about air travel, for example, may predict forthcoming volatility for the volume of shares for companies within that industry.

Nagle cautioned that, at least for now, social media sentiment is probably not enough to make an educated buy or sell decision, but it can - and will - be a factor in trading models going forward.

"It's useful to know what the public is saying about a company to help make those decisions, and theoretically using that data to make those decisions could be possible in the future," he said. "But for now, if the only piece of information you're using to make buy and sell decisions is social media, I would be concerned."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

It wasn't a big acquisition (TechCrunch was told around $15m) but it was a validation of some big ideas.

Rapportive is a simple thing, and yet it's founded on some complex and potent technology trends. Trends like: identity as platform, harvesting of social network user data and APIs for cross-site functionality. On top of profile data and email adresses, you can build awesome tools.

Rapportive is magical; it's one of the first things I show people when I am excited to show them something about the internet. Many people immediately see the value of it. When we first wrote about it here, we titled our post Stop What You Are Doing Right Now and Install This Browser Plug-in. No one objected, it was clearly awesome. (The line Stop What You Are Doing is something best reserved for when you can really back it up.)

Since that time, Rapportive has served as one of the most compelling elements in the still-unfullfilling ecosystem of CRM applications floating around the internet. None solve all your problems, most are hard to make the time to come back to. Not Rapportive, though. Not if you're a Gmail user, anyway. It delivers relationship management value in almost every email you send and recieve.

Much of that value comes from the integration of 3rd party services. There's a whole list of apps built on Rapportive. They sit in your email, look at who you're corresponding with and then let you interact with that person or their content on other social networks. Twitter and LinkedIn have been the best in my experience, but enterprise Rapportive users may have prefered other apps on the platform.

Woe, woe to LinkedIn if they screw with this. If LinkedIn is to Rapportive as Twitter has been to Tweetdeck then I am going to be one unhappy user. If LinkedIn treats Rapportive as well as it has treated CardMunch (which is a miracle app) then we're in good shape.

LinkedIn may serve up less data in Rapportive simply because this is probably the end of Rapportive's relationship with the super-controversial social data mining service Rapleaf. Update: Rapportive contacted me to say they haven't been using Rapleaf for more than a year now. Noted! Many people hate Rapleaf, but they love the Rapportive interface that serves up some of that information. Fortunately Rapportive does not surface some of the information Rapleaf makes available, like home and car ownership and family status.

Rapportive was the best example of what could be done with aggregated user data though! All too often, when you ask someone about aggregated social network user data they immediately say "I'm opposed to it!"

As a platform for the creation of products, services, new ways to relate to the people and the web arround us though - Rapportive is a beautiful example of what the future of the web could be. It's not about apps like Path sucking your phone's contact info into its servers without telling you; it's not about services like Pinterest surreptitiously changing your shared URLs to capture affiliate revenue.

No, the future of user data as a platform, in its best form, is to show you the faces of the people you're meeting by email. It's about helping you connect with them. Hey, you might say, I see you sent me an email. I haven't had a chance to reply yet, but you'll notice that I just started following you on Twitter. (A person can also guess another person's email by guessing at variations of their name @ their company domain.com.)

I sure hope Rapportive can grow and thrive in its new home. And I hope that it will inspire whole new worlds of startups building

In fact, according to Networked Insights' data, the Super Bowl topic that trended in third place was "Brady," but when you break that topic down, you realize it may actually have been more about Mrs. Tom Brady - supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who appeared on camera perhaps once during the game, whom Tweeters evidently referred to as "Mrs. Brady" or perhaps "Lady Brady" - than about the New England Patriots quarterback.

Though it may not be entirely surprising that commercials constitute the bulk of online chatter during the event, it's astonishing to see that TV commercials make up some 42% of all Super Bowl-related online chatter. Although New York Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw scored what Super Bowl history may record as the most awkward game winning touchdown - slowly being seated on the goal line after trying to stop himself short at the 1-yard line - his maneuver only elicited a minor wave compared with Mrs. Brady.

A spokesperson for Networked Insights told RWW this afternoon that part of the reason for the lopsided topic mix may have to do partly with the game. It was a low-scoring game with only one interception, whose outcome was only sealed when the clock reached zero. It may have been such a nail-biter, in other words, that true football fans may have been biting their nails rather than tapping their keys.

"It's not surprising to see viewers' commentary of Super Bowl advertisements surpass those of the game itself," Dan Neely, NI's CEO, tells RWW this afternoon. "Brands can partly attribute this social lift as a by-product of a low-scoring game that allowed viewers to discuss the commercials."

A word about the volume of tweets: Naturally, NI's tracking included tweets that included the hashtag #superbowl. NI estimates tweets to that hashtag alone to have numbered around 1.6 million, though it will have updated, hardened data later in the week. That's as many tweets as are normally archived in a single day, the NI spokesperson tells us.

As an analysis firm for advertisers, NI itself was concerned more with the commercials than the football. Gaining the most overall viewer response among celebrity endorsers was the tattooed, underwear-wearing veteran of what "far'ners" call football, David Beckham. His shorts reached out to 39% of folks talking about just the Super Bowl commercials (as opposed to the game), according to NI's figures. This is what NI means by "share of value." Sentiment among chatting consumers was 23% more positive than negative, suggesting the H&M undies went over well. Coming in second was Clint Eastwood, whose two-minute ad that may have been for Chrysler but may really have been for the city of Detroit, had 21% "share of value," while 9% of the discussion was more positive than negative.

Though NI gives Chrysler kudos for choosing Eastwood, it notes that the resulting chatter was three times more about him than about Chrysler.

By comparison, as much as 28% of folks chatting about Super Bowl topics during halftime were discussing Madonna's halftime show. Their discussion constituted 32% of Super Bowl-related social traffic by volume. Sentiment for Madonna was generally negative (-21%), with tweets about her staying relatively short, with a particularly negative peak towards the end where the lights converged to reveal the message, "WORLD PEACE." By contrast, sentiment for her on-stage co-star MIA - whose little birdie expressed exactly the opposite sentiment - ran generally positive at +6%, commanding 3% of the discussion. The star of the halftime show ended up being Nicki Minaj, whom perhaps more viewers recognized than Clint Eastwood. Minaj commanded a 7% share of value, with 26% of it more positive than negative.

Breaking down just the Madonna comments, MI found that as much as 2% of this subgroup were making comments about her age (53). This group was split down the middle as to whether she looked great for her age, with the negative group making snarky comments about such things as her "veiny" arms. Sentiment turned positive when she began singing "Like a Prayer," which was originally released in 1989, though it tipped downward to -11% after she began her latest single, "Give Me All Your Luvin.'" (NI does not appear to have data regarding consumer sentiment about its spelling.)

"The takeaway for networks, producers, and sports leagues is the need to create multiple engagement points around content that is in sync with the interests of a target audience," states NI's Dan Neely. "Going forward, the winners will be the programs that leverage social technology to drive participation."

What the Twitterers of the world may have missed Sunday night was the terrific sense of community and shared excitement. Just the NFL Experience - the week-long slate of activities in downtown Indianapolis among football fans who love the game and who keep their phones mostly in their pockets except to take pictures - pulled in some 265,000 people over a nine-day period, according to the latest estimates.

It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook's stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the company's unusually exclusive all-male Board of Directors and about mega-powerful COO Sheryl Sandberg's public calls for women to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. As a cultural phenomenon of historic proportion, what does the Facebook IPO mean with regard to gender?

The all-male board of Facebook makes you wonder why a company serving a user base of at least 50% half women has no female representation on the board. We told ourselves that women board directors can build value and bring win-win strategies to the table - let's #changetheratio here.

Bloomberg's Carol Hymowitz contrasts the all male membership of the board with Facebook's avowed social mission to empower the world and to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's powerful advocacy for women.

Facebook generally declines to comment on issues like this. It's typical of Silicon Valley's libertarian-leaning culture to believe that the best way to overcome injustices connected to gender, race, class and sexual orientation, are to ignore the existence of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. That approach may leave unresolved long-standing institutional, economic and cultural factors that stand in the way of equal opportunity and which cannot be overcome by society as a whole through the self interest and sheer force of will of people on the margins of power.

Sheryl Sandberg is the second most visible person at Facebook and will likely become a billionaire in the IPO. She's often said to be a prominent advocate of women in the workplace.

Doug Barry points out on Jezebel, though, that Sandberg's position is a very particular one: that women are fundamentally responsible for their own career development in corporate America and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Sandberg is well known for her 2010 TED talk Why we have too few women leaders, which has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Sandberg's message is directed at the elite crowd gathered at TED and adresses women who are not gaining top power positions in the organizations they work at. She offers three primary pieces of advice. "One, sit at the table," by which she means give yourself the credit you deserve and aim high. "Two, make your partner a real partner," or make sure that heterosexual married couples contain parents with equal earning power and responsibility and that men are encouraged to take responsibility around the house. "And three, don't leave before you leave," in other words keep seizing new opportunities despite the possibility you might take time off to have a child.

Those are relatively conservative political admonitions that speak primarily to the problems experienced by the women in society who are already closest to power.

Barry writes on Jezebel:

Not only is Sandberg exceptionally smart, but, after graduating from Harvard Business School, she landed a job at the World Bank as the chief of staff first for Larry H. Summers then the Treasury Secretary. A job at Google followed before she joined Facebook in 2008, an opportunity that Sandberg was prescient enough to take full advantage of. If success really is preparation meeting opportunity, Sandberg was more than prepared for her chance at professional success, but some women believe that when she insists on aiming high, she's discounting the fact that her meteoric rise owes itself, at least in part, to some very favorable circumstances (including the fact that her husband, Daniel Goldberg, is a successful entrepreneur in his own right and the couple doesn't have to worry about finding child care for their two sons).

Barry quotes Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Talent Innovation and director for the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University:

I'm a huge fan of her accomplishments and think she's a huge role model in some ways, but I think she's overly critical of women because she's almost implying that they don't have the juice, the chutzpah, to go for it...I think she's had a golden path herself, and perhaps does not more readily understand that the real struggles are not having children or ambition. Women are, in fact, fierce in their ambition, but they find that they're actually derailed by other things, like they don't have a sponsor in their life that helps them go for it.

That paragraph had a soft ending; there are far more unpleasant ways that many women are derailed than by a lack of a sponsor at work.

Courteney Martin, on one of the web's most respected feminist blogs, Feministing, says that while Sandberg's message to individual women is valuable, it is just one story.

In essence, her message is tantamount to The American Dream for the 21st century woman: the problem is not sexism or racism or classism, the problem is not pathetic work-family policy at the federal level, the problem is not collective. The problem is you. In the Gospel of Sandberg, individual women must find partners who will share the load and negotiate fiercely, overcome their own guilt about not being able to be fully present parents, and "lean in" to their careers despite the lack of structural or systemic supports that might make that feel even slightly safe or rewarding.

Reading this profile of Sandberg, I was reminded of Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, incredible TED Talk, in which she talks about "the danger of the single story." She explains, "The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

I actually think that Sandberg is smart and has great intentions with her message that women need to dig deep and stick to their own dreams. I agree with her in many ways... This is part of the story. But it's not the whole story.

The rest of the story is better told by women who didn't grow up with lots of familial and social support, women who didn't go to Harvard, women who weren't mentored by Larry Summers, women with different definitions of success and leadership.

To look at the bright side, perhaps Facebook's social technology will itself help other women tell their stories and hear the stories of women other than the most privileged elite.

The world's largest communication network between people is taking a big financial step, it's infamously opportunistic with changing ideas of privacy and it's lead by an all-male board and a woman whose perspective on gender is likely applauded by conservatives around the world. That all seems important to discuss.

Facebook's IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We've already covered several angles.

Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public - from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I've highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.

Facebook's IPO filing includes quarterly stats of its Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users, both worldwide and broken down by region. (Also, how about some appreciation for Facebook to sticking with "active" users in its stats, not just total, all-time sign-ups?)

Worldwide, you can see that 57% of the people who use Facebook within a given month also use Facebook on an average day, up from 47% in early 2009.

This varies, of course, by region, which gives an idea of how "sticky" Facebook is in different parts of the world. In the U.S. and Canada, it's 70%. In Asia, where Facebook isn't as established - but is growing fast - it's only about 50%.

Facebook is increasingly a global story. Its user base is now almost equally concentrated in the four regions it breaks out. That's a pretty big change from 2009, when it was primarily focused in the U.S. and Canada.

In 2011, about 30% of Facebook's new users came from Asia, and about 40% in the "rest of world" category. Only about 10% of its new users came from the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook's IPO filing also brings us new access to its finances. Here, we can see one reason why Facebook's revenue growth (88% in 2011) is outpacing its user growth (39% in 2011) - because Facebook is bringing in more revenue per user than it did in the past.

How did that happen? Significant growth in both Facebook's ad business (85% of its revenue) and its payments business (part of the 15% of "other" revenue).

Facebook's future success, of course, relies on both its ability to attract new users and its ability to generate more revenue per user.

Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times.

Global Transformation

"During the past 50 years, the expansion of education has contributed to a fundamental transformation of societies in OECD countries," wrote the authors of this year's lengthy report Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. (500 page PDF, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)

"In 1961, higher education was the privilege of the few, and even upper secondary education was denied to the majority of young people in many countries. Today, the great majority of the population completes secondary education, one in three young adults has a tertiary degree [Colleges, universities and polytechnics] and, in some countries, half of the population could soon hold a tertiary degree."

In other words, it's not an uneducated world gaining its first access to the information available in these free online education repositories. What's happening is augmentation of already historic global education levels.

Below: The United States used to be the most educated society in the world. That's no longer true. Click to view full size. From the OECD.

"Half a century ago, employers in the United States and Canada recruited their workforce from a pool of young adults, most of whom had high school diplomas and one in four of whom had degrees - far more than in most European and Asian countries," reports the OECD. "Today, while North American graduation rates have increased, those of some other countries have done so much faster, to the extent that the United States now shows just over the average proportion of tertiary-level graduates at age 25-34."

"First, each country has its own different processes and standards for accrediting completion of secondary or tertiary education. Second, the knowledge and skills acquired in education are by no means identical to those that enhance economic potential. And third, it has become increasingly evident that to realise human potential in today's societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling." (emphasis added)

That lifelong learning no doubt contributes to the global audience that amasses around this educational content online. For a high school teacher to be able to give their lectures not to 30 students at a time, but to 100,000 viewers around the world on YouTube has got to be a powerful opportunity. If many of those viewers are adults, so be it.

According to a presentation (10 page PDF) by Francesc Pedró, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Research and Information, OECD, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic change in the types of skills in demand in the workforce. A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for "routine manual skills" has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills.

Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.

Disruption

"A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it," writes radical Canadian educator Joe Bower in a summary of last month's 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden.

A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading...

"The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise."

Good luck, teachers of the world, keeping up with the Internet. It's great to hear that so many are embracing change, surely caused by technology, as an opportunity and not a threat.

That's the kind of life-long learning that professional development has always required but that will go on in a global context for perpetual learning with increasing access to high-quality educational content online.

That's a recipe for a very different world than the one we lived in last century.

In its S-1 filing today, Facebook outlined a litany of risks for the company going forward. Monetizing the mobile user base in a system dominated by its competitors will be a major challenge going forward. Diversifying its portfolio away from its reliance on advertising will be a big task, one that Google has never quite figured out. We take a deep dive into Facebook's risk factors below.

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What Are the Risks?

Facebook's risks are fundamentally tied to the fact that nearly 85% of the company's revenue is related to advertising. When most of your assets are tied to one cash vertical, any fluctuations can lead to dramatic swings in performance. Facebook also has concerns with competition, global expansion, infrastructure and retaining top talent. Here is the summary breakdown from the prospectus, with the exception of some specific stock risks.

We enlisted Antone Johnson, founder of the Bottom Line Law Group to help with the analysis of Facebook's risk factors. Johnson is a respected Silicon Valley lawyer who has spent 15 years representing technology and media companies. He was vice president of legal affairs at eHarmony as well as assistant general counsel to Intermix Media, which included serving as director of business and legal affairs at Myspace, culminating in the company's $650 million sale to Fox.

Johnson on Facebook's reliance on advertising:

"Main story here is the drop from 98% to 85% of revenue being generated by advertising. Obviously a good risk mitigation approach to diversify with revenue from virtual goods, etc. Again, mobile jumps out as an important theme; given they admittedly don't make ad revenue from mobile users, this could be a significant headwind for FB in coming years as smartphones become near-universal and people become accustomed to using them as their primary means of accessing social media.

"The rest of this risk factor is par for the course."

Mobile

According to the S-1, around half of Facebook's users access the website through mobile devices. Facebook has a robust mobile presence and it iterates its native apps constantly. As an advertising-based business, Facebook has a distinct problem here.

It does not serve ads in its mobile apps.

Facebook has 425 million monthly active users on its mobile platform as of December 2011. Mobile is rapidly becoming a replacement for personal computers and that threatens Facebook's advertising model. The key for Facebook will be to turn mobile users into mobile dollars.

"They are forthcoming about the challenges," Johnson said. "No revenue currently generated from mobile advertising; unclear how much mobile use could be monetized; failure to solve this puzzle combined with a dramatic shift toward mobile usage could be a serious problem for FB; and per the next risk factor, they don't control the iOS and Android platforms. Frankly, if there were one thing that persuaded me not to invest in FB (given the growth assumptions built into current valuation), this would be it."

As we have written before, Facebook iterates constantly. Its philosophy in mobile is to "move fast, break things and fix things fast," the company's managing engineer for mobile, Dave Fetterman, said at Facebook's f8 developer conference last September.

"Being able to write it once today and ship it tomorrow? That is something that Facebook is really good at and that we love doing and that is at the center of being able to move fast," Fetterman said.

Now that Facebook is a public company, will it be able to keep that mentality? When things break, that directly affects a company's stock price.

Reliance on Mobile Platforms

Facebook also has the problem that it does not control the mobile platforms that carry its app. That means part of Facebook's prosperity is tied to the stability of Apple's iOS, Android, BlackBerry etc.

Many of the major technology companies are dependent on the others. The Big Five (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon) have something of an incestuous relationship. Each is a pillar that supports a much larger structure. When one of those pillars is weakened, another may become stronger but the overall ecosystem may suffer. This is exemplified in Facebook's mobile predicament.

"The best way to view this might be as the 'Google Risk Factor,' and I think recent Android sales/market share figures must have FB running scared. Apple has never been a significant player in social and seems unlikely to be anytime soon," Johnson said.

Elaborating, Johnson compares the Google/Facebook relationship to the trouble caused when Microsoft built Internet Explorer into Windows in the late 1990s and how that affected the biggest player at the time, Netscape.

"'Any changes in such systems that degrade our products' functionality or give preferential treatment to competitive products' presumably means Android being optimized for G+ in every iteration going forward, giving it unfair advantages vs FB mobile. (Shades of Microsoft building IE into Windows years ago?) It would probably raise some serious antitrust concerns, but the wheels of antitrust enforcement turn so slowly that it might not matter much in the end (as was the case with Microsoft and Netscape)."

Competition

Right next to reliance on advertising, one of the biggest risk factors is the fact that Facebook faces a vibrant social ecosystem that wants to chip away at the company's user base. Google+ and Twitter are both mentioned in the S-1 while other entities worldwide, such as Orkut, could hinder Facebook growth.

The way Facebook defines itself in the S-1 is directly correlated to how it describes the competition. More or less, that means the denizens at Google at this stage.

"Competition is always a highly ranked risk factor, in this case the broad range of what FB considers competitive is striking," Johnson said. "This is also the second 'Google Risk Factor' with references made to G+, Orkut, 'Google Search plus Your World,' Android, and war chests for acquisitions (presumably Google and Microsoft's). International competition plays a greater role than I would have expected, but it make sense given how much of FB's growth in recent years has been driven by international."

User Growth, Retention and Revenue

Facebook's first bullet point in its risks section is the ability to retain users and get them to spend more time on the site. While Facebook is the dominant social platform on the Web, its position as the top dog is not guaranteed in the long run. Look at what happened to Myspace.

Johnson's analysis:

"'We anticipate that our active user growth rate will decline over time' reflects the 'law of large numbers' - i.e., don't expect metrics to grow at these rates forever. This is a common-sense observation. What will be interesting is how FB responds. 'To the extent our active user growth rate slows, our business performance will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement in current and new markets.' That suggests FB is rightly focused on increasing site engagement per user over time rather than merely squeezing more revenue out of each user through aggressive monetization tactics. This language sends the right message that FB is focused on the product/user experience long-term and is willing to trade off short-term monetization against that principle.

"The striking contrast here is MySpace. I didn't see this myself because I left in August 2006, but many MySpace execs who stuck around longer argue the UX was degraded and ultimately ruined post-News Corp. acquisition because the mandate to hit revenue targets undermined the product itself. This risk factor might as well go on to name MS explicitly the way it continues, 'A number of other social networking companies that achieved early popularity have since seen their active user bases or levels of engagement decline, in some cases precipitously.'"

Zynga and the Zynga Ecosystem

When Zynga filed for its IPO, we noted that the company was overly-reliant on Facebook for all of its revenue. We also wondered why Facebook does not just buy Zynga. That would eliminate this entire risk category. Well, the inverse is also true. Right now, Zynga drives about 12% of Facebook's revenue. Zynga is important to Facebook in two aspects: direct advertising revenue and payments. Much of Facebook's Credits program is tied to games and Zynga is the largest provider of games to Facebook. Overall, Zynga contributes 80% to Facebook Credits revenue.

Zynga is not exactly a company conquering the world right now. Its own stock has been more or less flat since it went public, its management has been criticized heavily and, outside of a few major hits like Mafia Wars and Words With Friends, many of its titles are lackluster. It is also in Zynga's best interest to diversify its portfolio and rely less on Facebook. That will include its own mobile strategies, websites and social platforms like Google+.

Zynga is also indicative of the third-party ecosystem that Facebook relies upon. The growth of the Facebook application ecosystem ties in with the company's ability to grow the platform and monetize each user either through ads or payments.

"Much of this just sounds like variations on the theme of trading off user experience vs. monetization - in this case through viral promotion of social gaming," Johnson said. "The wording, 'We are continuously seeking to balance the distribution objectives of our Platform developers with our desire to provide an optimal user experience, and we may not be successful in achieving a balance that continues to attract and retain Platform developers' suggests that users will always win (probably wise) at the expense of developers. Reliance on Zynga apps for Payments revenue is also a theme."

The Zuckerberg Effect

To its credit, Facebook recognizes that its mercurial CEO is one of its biggest assets and could be one of its biggest detriments. Zuckerberg owns the single biggest majority of Facebook's post-IPO stock and hence has a great degree of control over what the company does. With that comes a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. We will see how well he handles that responsibility.

"As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally," the report states.

"This may be the first time in history a sole founder has had this degree of enduring voting power over a company going public at such a size and valuation -- not just for the foreseeable future, but beyond the grave," Johnson said. "I'm frankly shocked to see language that would allow all of Zuckerberg's extraordinary governance rights to be transferred to his designated successor in the event of his death. That's admittedly a remote occurrence given his young age, but as an investor or Board member, I would vehemently object to that provision. It's one thing to have complete trust in Mark to run the company, quite another to entrust his appointed successor with that kind of domination as a matter of corporate governance. It has the feel more of a family dynasty business than of a modern publicly traded tech company."

The S-1 also mentions Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg specifically several times. Many of Facebook's original founders have left the company to start their own enterprises. Zuckerberg is the important pin, but Sandberg is important glue to hold the company together on a day-to-day basis. One of the biggest jobs for Sandberg will be to monitor Zuckerberg and remind him of his responsibility to the stockholders. Neither individual is going to relish that position but as Facebook grows up and goes public, it is a necessary for the C-suite to police itself.

So it was that the local newspaper "exposed" my mother as a fraud, a counterfeiter. It ran a story with the painting next to the Life magazine photograph itself. Thus began a lifelong dialog that became one of the threads of my life: a case study in fair use that fueled endless debates in the Socratic method between Mom and her art students for the next four decades. It began with the delicious irony of the newspaper having reprinted the Life photograph without Time-Life's permission, and embraced the lovely fact Mom eventually sold the painting for many times the original price.

Whose polar bear is this?

Döring is not one of these Luddites afraid of any typewriter that has a TV screen attached; he's relatively active with social media, including regular posts to Twitter (@senadoring). It's there where one of his readers, a lady named Ophelia Pastrana (@mpastrana), whose profile describes her as "anti-print," noticed something familiar about Döring's background wallpaper. It's a beautiful shot of a polar bear stretched out on a rocky, snowy terrain enjoying the sunset, with a face not unlike the Senator's own. It's something my mother would likely have considered painting sometime. But indeed, it would appear to be a screen grab directly from the Mangelsen stock photo agency, whose Web page clearly licenses the photo for royalties.

And so it was that Sen. Döring was called out as a fraud, a counterfeiter. Never mind for a moment the delicious irony that the act of demonstrating Döring's most grievous fault effectively copies the exact same photograph. Supposedly such demonstrations in the act of journalism constitute "fair use."

In other words, it's all right for a journalist to do it, but not for a senator. Evidently fairness may differ depending on whom you're being fair to.

Who needs one big brother when a billion little ones will do?

This is the very type of topic my mother relished. In her ingenious, professorial style, which often resembled Justice John Marshall as rendered by Buffy Sainte-Marie, she'd compel her students to adopt one position ("Every photograph qualifies as art, so copying it without permission is forgery") and then throw a live grenade at them that challenged their newfound position. At such a moment, like Perry Mason closing an argument, she'd extract from behind a cabinet some hidden photo of a painting by Andy Warhol (whom she loathed, by the way), one produced by way of the manipulation of copyrighted photos, and watch her students backtrack ("Oh, that's different, Andy Warhol's famous").

Sen. Döring has suggested that the act of policing each other, of ensuring that we don't step on each other's intellectual property rights, can be crowdsourced. Since the Internet is essentially a cooperative, a kind of digital society, then infringement is something we can all make efforts to help each other avoid. Never mind for a moment the eerie resemblance to Chinese families helping each other to refrain from bearing siblings. The suggestion Döring makes is that we all know infringement when we see it.

Do we? A Spain-based blog post (English-language Google translation here) called Döring out for being two-faced, for having the gall to promote a system of registering intellectual property violations, and for having spoken out against the SOPA bill in the U.S., while at the same time using a copyrighted polar bear as his wallpaper. Evidently the mark of a career politician.

In an adjacent paragraph, the blogger suggests that a polar bear belongs to everyone. Exactly what right did the photographer have to claim the bear's repose as his own? Shouldn't the bear have a say in this? And elsewhere, the same post states (translating from Spanish), "copying is the most common process in the digital environment," something which folks do every day, perhaps inadvertently. Or put another way, it's fair for a blogger to do it, and maybe for a bear, but not a senator.

Theft Is Theft (void where prohibited)

At one level, the SOPA debate brought thousands, and perhaps millions, of people together to collectively agree on something, perhaps "Censorship Bad," perhaps something greater. But the true problem we face as a people and as a society, as we continue to take what truly are the first steps in the age of digital communication, is that we don't know what we're talking about. It's impossible to legislate a principle that we have not yet defined in the public mind. To a member of the MPAA, it may seem clear-cut enough: You steal a movie, that's piracy. But a principle is deeper than a campaign slogan; it's something definitive that applies to the future as much as to the present.

"Fair use" is a concept we believe to be well-defined in U.S. law. There are reasons we need to copy things, for example, in research, in journalism, in exercising our own freedom of expression by borrowing an idea, in art. Fair use would say it's okay to slap a picture of a polar bear on your notebook. It would be wrong to broadcast that picture without proper attribution to the photographer.

But Twitter turns that distinction entirely upside down. Every little thing you do is a broadcast; every polar bear you slap on your cover is a little act of infringement. While it seems altruistic enough that we should help each other to not step on one another's toes, where do we stop? Most of the tweets that will be generated as a result of this article are copies of each other. The Internet is, by its very nature, a giant replication factory. While it may have been easy for each of us to take a side for or against SOPA, Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman was right in telling AllThingsD's Peter Kafka yesterday that the polarization created through the debate may be blinding us to the underlying issue of what kind of copying is fair and what kind wrong.

Here, you can read about what Dauman told Kafka on stage in this blog post. It's been conveniently copied, in its entirety, without permission, from something first published by Mashable.

The report comes against the backdrop of Facebook's pending, initial public offering and illustrates that advertising models for social networks seem to be working. Twitter gets 90% of its revenue from U.S. advertisers, while LinkedIn depends more on foreign advertisers, with just 68% of its 2012 ad revenue expected to come from the U.S.

Still, if eMarketer's analysis of data from dozens of research firms, company information and industry trends is correct, Twitter will have revenue of $540 million by 2014. LinkedIn would have revenue of $405.6 million by 2014, fueled in part by an increase in U.S.-based advertising.

Speaking at the AllThingsD media conference on Monday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company has no plans to develop new revenue streams.

"We think we're good where we're at," Costolo said, according to Wired. "We don't feel like we need to add another component to the business in order to create the lasting company."

LinkedIn has recently come under fire for its advertising practices. Its privacy policy allows the company to use users' personal information in ads for the site. While the policy has been in effect for quite some time, it recently gained attention as messages highlighting it started spreading among users of the jobs and careers social network.

But Hollywood isn't always acting alone. Sometimes, the savviest Web companies around - Netflix, for instance - are playing along, with their own agendas.

The latest example: Not only must Netflix customers wait 56 days before renting Warner Bros. new release discs, but they can't even add them to their rental queues until 28 days after they've been released. Sounds a little nuts, no?

Whether this plan sells more DVDs or not, it's hard to escape the fact that Netflix's user experience is suffering a bit because of it, and that seems like something Netflix should fight. But Netflix is actually on board!

Instead of telling Hollywood to get lost with silly ideas like this, Netflix is cooperating. It doesn't have to buy DVDs directly from studios and play along with 28- or 56-day windows: Netflix can legally go out and buy DVDs anywhere - Walmart, Amazon, you name it - and rent them out as much as it wants. But it isn't doing that. It's playing along.

Why? A couple of reasons. To some extent, because it's easier and more reliable for Netflix to buy discs directly from Warner Bros. instead of relying on third-party vendors. Netflix admits as much (PDF). But more importantly, because Netflix actually has the same goal that the studios do: To try to discourage you from renting DVDs.

The future of Netflix is 100% based on its ability to grow into the best streaming video entertainment service. Renting discs is very profitable for Netflix, but it's the past. That's why it went as far as to try separating its DVD business last year as "Qwikster," and that's why it's letting studios make DVD rentals less attractive with windows and queue restrictions.

The sooner you get disgusted and cancel your DVD rental subscription, the stronger Netflix's case to the studios becomes that they need streaming, or else.

So far, that isn't really happening. An analysis by Tristan Louis shows that all of the top 100 movies from 2010 are available on DVD, but the vast majority aren't available as streaming rentals. Netflix actually had the best streaming rental selection vs. iTunes, Amazon, or Vudu, according to Louis's analysis, but it's still only a small fraction of the top movies. Not yet good enough.

Netflix has been successful in its efforts to reduce its number of DVD subscribers, however, albeit with significant damage to its reputation.

At the end of 2011, Netflix had just 11 million DVD subscribers, down significantly from last year and well below its 22 million streaming subscribers. "We expect DVD subscribers to decline steadily every quarter forever," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on the company's Q4 earnings call last week (PDF transcript).

Assuming this trend continues, Netflix will be in a position to say to the studios: Look, the vast majority of our subscribers won't be able to watch this movie unless you stream it. So stream it.

That might not work, anyway. There's plenty of competition on the way for Netflix, ranging from Amazon, Apple and Google to the cable companies. And it will need to keep its edge using other techniques, too, such as obtaining exclusive and/or original programming. But this is the future Netflix is choosing, so it needs to try.

The takeaway: If you're renting discs from Netflix now, expect more weirdness ahead.

About 38% of American cellphone owners called a friend for advice about a purchase while shopping. 25% looked up prices for a product found in a store while 24% looked up product reviews. The cumulative total was that 52% of U.S. adult cellphone owners used their cellphones while shopping over the holiday season and 33% use their cellphones specifically for online information of physical goods.

According to Pew, one in five of these "mobile price matchers" would eventually make a purchase online instead of at the retail store. That translates into 5% of all cellphone owners who made purchases online after stepping foot in a retail store. That may not seem like a big number but when it comes to big retail, each percentage point could mean millions if not near billions of dollars. The old retail adage of "just get them in the store" is starting to slip as easy access to information sits in every consumers' pockets.

Of the mobile price matchers, 37% decided not to purchase the product t all, 35% purchased the product at the store, 19% purchased the product online and 8% purchased the product at another store.

The biggest takeaway from Pew's findings is that mobile commerce starting to significantly affect the conversion rates of physical retail stores. How can retail stores stem the tide of consumers deciding to make a purchase elsewhere once they already have them in the store?

The strategy revolves around having a strong mobile Web presence. That does not necessarily mean an actual native app. If you are in a retail store researching with your phone and you Google the product, the retail store should be one of the first results. With the location abilities of smartphones, the search could even tell you what store or neighborhood you are actually in. The retailer could then be able to offer a deal or an incentive to buy and offer to complete the transaction through the device. The mobile Web app could hook into your mobile wallet and bill you directly or instruct the consumer to see the cashier where payment could be made by either near field communications (NFC) or by scanning a QR code. The idea is to control both the research and the transaction. Channel the consumer to your product.

Did you research your holiday spending on your phone? How have your shopping habits changed since you bought a smartphone? Let us know in the comments.