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Let me sum up the state of information security for you, save you a little time: the problems are more complex, the threats more ominous, the vulnerabilities more numerous, the attacks are more sophisticated, the intruders nearly invisible.

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Leave it to Nicholas Carr to get us so twisted up that his mere name evokes a leer or a cheer, and rarely anything in between. His big stir ("Does IT Matter") gave way to "The Big Switch" (his book), and just for fun in between he published things like "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Done questioning whether we matter, in "Twitter Dot Dash," he questioned our patter.

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Here's one simple ingredient for monetizing video: Get lots of video traffic. Here's one simple ingredient for driving video traffic: Make the video great. Here's one simple ingredient for great video: Create content that matters. Here are three simple ingredients for creating content that matters: Make it entertaining; make it practical; make it easy to find. Blend rigorously, optimize video search engines, and wait for dough ($) to rise.

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Brazil just sounds exotic: the rain forest, the Amazon. My yardstick usually consists of how many shots and pills CDC recommends, and leaving the clinic I felt like A-Rod on my way to batting practice. But we journeyed to Sao Paulo, far from the Amazon, and our mission was much more pedestrian: to explore Banco Real. What we found wasn't exotic, but alluring: a bank that has taken eco-leadership to fertile ground in a country basting in the politics of green.

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Conveniently, surprisingly, I was flying from LAX to New York's JFK the very first day Gogo's wireless in-flight service launched on American Airlines. I had a lovely video chat, watched some YouTube, downloaded one of our videos, and instant messaged (some of it at the same time) for almost five hours. Everything worked perfectly. And I haven't used it since. Yet I was still excited to talk to Row 44, which is in trials with Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines.

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Adobe announced what it calls an alliance with Time Warner, today, saying that Time Warner will fully embrace Adobe's Flash and video tools for Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., and HBO. As announcements go, I'm not all that partial to those touting new alliances, but this one adds snugly to the list of entertainment companies evolving their business models as advertisers Nip/Tuck some of their broadcast TV dollars.

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Very few of us get to see our daily drudgery contribute to something politically, environmentally, or sociologically charged, to a cause with greater implications than the outcome of driving the machinery of Brand X or Company Y; sleepless nights reimagining business processes, building customer portals, renegotiating a key vendor contract, all for company, livelihood, or a write-up in HR's internal newsletter.

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Suddenly, somehow, maybe even unintentionally, Adobe's got a flat tire like the ones you gave your friends in grade school. For years it found niches we now take for granted, and insatiable apps to consume its technology with frenzy, and yet, inexplicably, it remained largely unchallenged. It became dominant without being threatening, kind of like a benign vampire novel except it's suddenly being banned in the church; or in this case, on far too many mobile devices.

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Mobile World Congress and Barcelona surprised me this year more than any other. I rediscovered Parc Guell, a Guadi-gingerbread-ish spectacle I'd forgotten; our audio engineer was almost mugged right in front of me on the subway -- I'd always heard of the dangers in this city; hookers were rampant on La Rambla (I'm just reporting here); and everyone from mobile operators to handset makers to content providers added a little spice to the mix, like a tasty paella on a midnight eating binge (again, just reporting).

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Mobile World Congress is an enormous show that cuts across the entire mobile ecosystem, from the die casters to the equipment manufacturers to the mobile operators to the handset makers to a diverse roster of content providers (there's even a developer garage), and they are all here again in force in Barcelona, home to the colorful architecture of Gaudi and an insanely endless arsenal of appetizers called tapas, good for arresting every taste bud and an apt metaphor for Mobile World Congress.

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I arrived in Austin, Texas, today to go talk to IBM, again, about how it's helping make the planet smarter, this time focusing on how Web 2.0 technologies can help companies become more green. I am well prepared for Austin because I was just here in November (editor's note: It was October, Fritz), and I have a photogenic memory (editor's note: uh, photographic, and no).

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Semantic search is like porn: I'm pretty sure I'll know it when I see it. So when semantic search upstart Truevert came by for a visit, I got all googly (I think I might have even screamed "yahoo"). The Truevert system, powered by OrcaTec's discovery toolkit, is narrowly defined around green, but it's definitely an eye-opening, fresh approach to an elusive problem.

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I'm sure just about everything can happen in the cloud these days -- maybe even things I don't want to know about. But when we're starting to help companies perform API management in the cloud, which is what Mashery is doing, it's probably a pretty good sign.

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On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, John Croce, a program manager with Sprint's Emergency Response Team (ERT), not only took my call, but put off lunch for a few minutes and whistled off an e-mail to his client, then told me all Sprint was doing to provide both coverage and emergency response for the nation's capital. I guess they take that "response" part seriously.

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Honest, CES was my first real hands-on look at the netbook class of notebooks, so I'm a little behind. HP called its version a "companion PC." I'm not sure if that means it's your companion, or an extra device to bring along. Regardless, these are -- naturally -- getting much more powerful, much more energy efficient and much more useful. For a certain class of power users (and maybe that's a majority), this could become the only device they carry.

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Sometimes it's the tiniest things that thrill me. In the middle of the gigantic TVs and the booming sound systems and the magic acts and the private suites and the thrumming parties was Ctera, an 18-employee company headquartered in Israel. When they showed me their device, I literally did a double-take (luckily off camera; very awkward). The CloudPlug is a tiny plug with a processor inside, an Ethernet jack, and a USB port, with which you can turn any USB device into a NAS and back up your data to Ctera's cloud-based service. And it's so damned cute.

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Last year Horizon Fuel Cell blew us away with a generator/charging device that used water to create electricity. My colleague, David Berlind, filed this blog, and this video on YouTube that not only produced more than 1.3 million views, but well over a hundred comments, many of them doubting the viability of the technology. This year, the company has not only created a final product, but showed off smaller, cleverer versions as well.

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Stress is ... a big presentation, managing a budget, dealing with end-user gripes, rolling out a new application, traveling, attending a trade show. But now, thanks to HeartMath emWave, you can effectively manage your stress. This technology is good for an individual, or certainly for a corporation that cares about the well-being of its employees (know any of those?).

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HP's been busy, and in some surprising ways. It has always been an inventive, engineering-oriented company, but other than its printers (where it continues to reign supreme), the company hasn't been a consistent winner in the desktop and consumer space. At CES it showed off an impressive (and overwhelming) array of technology, from its TouchSmart interface to its high-end displays to its netbooks and light notebooks to its home media appliance.

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There were lots of big empty spaces at CES this year, like vacant stores in a shopping mall. Many of the would-be exhibitors had booked hotels and meeting space, so they still came and set up shop off site. I'm not sure if NEC was one of them, but one might draw that conclusion. We pranced down to the ballroom at the Embassy Suites (who knew they had more than one!) to see NEC's interesting NP62 mobile projector.

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I know I said I didn't really care about more Bluetooth headsets, but it's always so much fun to see what Blue Ant is up to. Call me a hypocrite. We talked to Blue Ant about its latest technology, Q1, which combines improved noise suppression with the voice control capabilities it launched earlier this year. (Still looking for a Bluetooth headset that fits into those massive ear holes kids are sporting these days.)

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Was it me, or did it seem like LG has taken over half of the space at CES? Its TVs and giant walls lined the inescapable booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center. If it's true that there were 130,000 attendees at CES, then I saw most of them in the LG stand, nearly got trampled a half dozen times, once getting stuck behind Yahoo founder Jerry Yang's entourage (undoubtedly trying to find him a job) and some suits from CBS. An LG PR person told me there had been an altercation earlier. OK, the LG HDTVs are superb, but not worth fighting over.

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LG's Martin Valdez looks a little like he could enter an Elvis look-alike contest, a much-needed feature for what ended up being mostly show: The unveiling of LG's Cell Phone Watch. For once, this actually looks like something you might want to wear, and I don't mean for the khaki/sneaker set either (you know who you are). This is stylish. Maybe sexy. But it doesn't work. The ideas are great, but at this point, because the device is far from shipping, they're just ideas.

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Palm booked a VIP suite at CES, guarded it with official looking beef boys, spared little expense on meeting canopies, food, alcohol, and ambiance for its selected guests (somehow I got in anyway), and set up some swanky demo stations where you could look at (but not touch) its latest mobile offering. Palm called it Pre, which I pronounced, mistakenly (though you can imagine why), "pray"; and its OS the Palm Web OS, known pre-announcement as Nova. Like the car.

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On the eve of CES in 2008 I was so giddy an oblong ear bud might have made me moist. This year, you can ... well, you can shove 'em in your ear. The pompadoured David Caruso (CSI: Miami) and his handlers picked TechWeb to talk to last year (I don't remember what he said, but he did that look -- you know, where he looks like he's looking at the ground, but he's looking at you at the same time, all dramatic like); now my in-box for meeting requests is practically crickets chirping. Not even Cisco seems to care if I come visit or not. Ever get the feeling that everyone just wants to muddle through and get it over with?

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Past an incomprehensible genocide and a still-agrarian economy lies a country that's pinning its last gasp of hope on the Internet to lift itself out of poverty, prevent future violence, and become the economic hub of sub-Saharan Africa. Some of TechWeb's TV crew traveled into the heart of Rwanda, crouched in the jungle amid a sea of silverback gorillas, danced on the border of the notoriously dangerous Democratic Republic of Congo, and came back with a remarkable, mesmerizing story of hope.

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Write this down: We will look back on these few years -- ostensibly 2006 until the end of this decade -- as the remarkable revolution of television. We are transforming it right now and, I fear, not appreciating it. Time-shifting was just a blip, and I don't mean to diminish it, but like the West Coast offense, small ball, and reality TV, it's just one building block among many.

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"Why didn’t you take the $33 per share, Jerry?" John Battelle asked Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang 33 different ways at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit until, on some level, you cringed for the poor bastard. Moments earlier, Battelle had introduced Yang as a man he'd known for a long time, a man who doesn't back down from a fight. Then Battelle – gently at first – brought the fight. I interview people for a living in front of cameras, but this was simply a masterpiece and ultimately I cringed for the both of them: Battelle for having to do it; Yang for wandering aimlessly, sadly, and, I suppose humanly. This was among dozens of remarkable, memorable moments in a conference that seems to keep getting better each year.

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Riding the tailwind of an historical election, Web 2.0 Summit set out to establish the Web as part of that history thanks to a dynamic, provocative panel that included Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post), Gavin Newsom (yeah, that one: Mayor of San Francisco), and Joe Trippi (political consultant).

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At the Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco, executives from Salesforce.com, Google, Adobe, and VMWare attempted to take the cloud discussion beyond the typical "compute-in-cloud" model, and into some uncomfortable and ambitious places.

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I can't tell whether Mark Zuckerberg is obtuse or just plain real. I can't tell whether he's going to follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates (debated forever as simultaneously genius and evil). But what I can tell you is that he is an never-ending source of amusement and wonder, and never more so than when he's on stage at Web 2.0.

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If nothing else, AT&T is making major symbolic gestures toward consumer broadband and mobile broadband services, and by doing so is trying to demonstrate its willingness to paint itself as a new AT&T. The gestures are, indeed, impressive, but the company's reluctance to admit its failures damages its credibility.

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Tell me if you've heard this before: Economy in crisis today; tomorrow looks bright; let me tell you why you should be excited about where technology is going. Intel CEO Paul Otellini sang this hymn on stage at Web 2.0 Summit this morning, painting a vision for the future of enterprise collaboration that was as engaging as it was elusive.

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As part of the continuing theme of do-good at Web 2.0 Summit 2008, Lance Armstrong, unretired cyclist-cum-philanthropist extraordinaire, took the main stage as the dinner keynote. This was the only appearance he agreed to honor after announcing his cycling comeback and his visit was much anticipated. It didn't disappoint.

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On the heels of the Yahoo deal that fell apart V 2, comeback CEO Jerry Yang was skewered by the able hands of Web 2.0 Summit host John Battelle earlier today. Yang looked weary, to say the least; and who wouldn't, after seeing hundreds of millions of potential revenue flushed away thanks to Google's reluctance to battle the DOJ. Worse, Yang's strategy for Yahoo looked pretty close to a train wreck; or maybe warmed-over leftovers of a Web that's passed his company by.

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At Web 2.0, New York Magazine's John Heilemann talked to John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) about a myriad of issues, from some of our nation's priorities to the economy to where he sees venture investment going. Heilemann, fresh off a flight from Chicago where he finished covering the presidential election, claimed his first two questions came directly from Barack Obama.

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Dr. Larry Brilliant, today's first speaker at the annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, has marked a turn in the tone of this seminal conference. Brilliant, a long-time philanthropist who has spent his life helping fight disease around the world, is the executive director of Google.Org, the search giant's attempt to make a difference in the world, and he opened the main stage conversations and "high order bits," with John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly.

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Don't be alarmed if you can't decide whether midroll is better than preroll (the former happens after you turn 30), or if lower-third overlays are a good thing (better than a layover in Dallas, I'm sure), because -- and I don't want to name names here, but what choice do I have -- nobody's figured out the right way to make money on Web TV.

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There are lots of things I've wanted to do aboard a flight. Blogging wasn't really on that list. But here I am, $12.95 lighter, 36,000 feet above the earth, American Airlines Flight 34, Thursday, Aug. 21, heading from L.A. to New York. Blogging. And that's not all!

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Mark Cuban made his fortunes with Internet radio. He's making his noise about Internet video, taking swipes in his blog at YouTube, the Internet as a delivery medium, NBC, and anyone doing HD on the Internet.

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Shooting video sounds so glamorous. Just saying you're on your way home from shooting a documentary feels a little Hollywood, especially if you throw on a pair of shades inside Dulles airport and your destination is actually LAX. Getting out the camera for security screening, taking the upgrade earned from untold miles in the air, putting on the Bose headphones over the baseball cap and tossing the flip flops under the seat; noticing halfway through the flight you're sitting next to Cheech Marin, watching him order the ice cream sundae while his svelte, attractive companion gets the cheese plate. And I'm thinking about seeing if he's carrying a little something from the old days just for fun.

Here’s the truth: It might just be the most fun I’ve ever had working, but it’s not all glamour.

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Unemployment numbers are rising, according to the U.S. government's latest labor stats. In the hunt for new work, do you think a Web-based video resumé would help you stand out from other job candidates? Some folks think it's worth a try.

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Harnessing the collective wisdom of the crowd always sounds so good in theory, but few do it really well. More important, few have figured out the best ways to do it inside the walls of a corporation. I was surprised a couple weeks ago when the head of our HR department forwarded a job description to several of us to help her fill: It was for a company-wide Wiki manager -- not the "manager" role that makes it run and administers it, but the kind that evangelizes it, gets people to use it, and finds interesting threads and knowledge developing from it. I hope this is a new trend in corporate intelligence mining. On a related note, I talked to Paul Plushckell, CEO of Spigit, a company creating some interesting social network tools for the businesses.

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You know that rash, that one you don't want to talk about but that you keep scratching and wondering about but you're afraid to go to the doctor and get it checked out? I'm kidding -- but seriously, if you did, you could go to MEDgle first and find out how seriously to take it. This self-funded startup is yet another interesting way to exploit the expansiveness of the Web to create a new business opportunity.

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In an upcoming InformationWeek cover story and online special report on the future of Web video (coming out next week), one of the areas I explored was content delivery networks. As executive producer of TechWeb TV, I publish a fair share of video, but it's been a while since I was able to take a deep dive into the land of CDNs, and boy, have they changed.

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The cable companies are in trouble, but the trouble is so avoidable. They have home and business premise access, and those lines have been robust enough to carry hundreds of video channels, many now in high definition. The addition of phone and Internet service has been, I'm sure, a fantastic boon to their businesses. But the growth of video on the Internet and the power of the Web as its platform will be this decade's final disrupter. Those with no urgency today will be scrambling for survival tomorrow. Time is ticking like a clock in Kitchen Stadium.

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Startup Replay Solutions has mostly (re)played in the gaming world, with customers like Electronic Arts, Vivendi, and Microsoft, but now it's moving into financial services and other verticals with its TiVo-like ability to re-create and play back application sessions for quality assurance and testing.

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In a cover story for InformationWeek next week, I will say the following (technically I've already said it, you just haven't read it yet; technically, I'm paraphrasing myself, which may be a form of plagiarism, but I don't know): I think Web Video is undergoing a massive upheaval today. Right now. Before our eyes. I think in two years, the lines between what we watch on the Web and what we watch on television will cease to blur. I think all video will soon be delivered over the Internet. I think it's already happening. I think we all know it.

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I am not a fan of hockey. I make no apologies for that, but I do love seeing hockey live. No other sport beats it. So when I sat down with Josh Schachter, the founder of startup HockeyBarn.com, I expected to have to make myself concentrate really hard to appear interested as he rattled off things like shots on goal and the mystical notion of icing. Instead, this passionate young entrepreneur wowed me with a very cool social media idea.

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It just so happens that more startups fail than succeed. It just so happens that startups have more ideas before breakfast than most of us have in our lifetime; it's just that sometimes they don't wake up until lunch. It just so happens that startup founders can be a little eccentric (and passionate and blindly brilliant and single-minded and stubborn).

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