As the great #JackMa attends the opening bell of his #Alibaba ($BABA) IPO at the NYSE the pundits concentrate on the numbers: Raising $21.8B; Employees 26845; 279M Active buyers; $8.5B Annual  Revenue. But the real impact of this float is the way that Ma is a role model for entrepreneurs worldwide. Just watching him interview about what he wants for this company and from where he came from is truly inspirational. If you have teenagers dial him up on YouTube (I know they don't READ anything!) and show them a humble genius.  Great stuff. Congratulaitons Jack.

On the day that #Netflix expands into #Europe and the US Federal Communications
Commission holds round table discussions on ‘net neutrality’ (Click for March  DigiShort http://is.gd/ZkTUA6 ) there is not much of a welcome for US digital  innovators from the continent’s politicians and entrenched big business. The new  EU Commission looks like it will demand that #Google disclose its ‘secret sauce’ search algorithm and #Uber has been banned in Germany. Meanwhile, in France, Orange Telecom is refusing to carry Netflix to its home users without payment from Netflix. Nothing ‘neutral’ about that!

Given the hype surrounding Apple's new product launch yesterday I guess it might
have taken news that they found Malaysian Flight MH370 for it to beat
expectations. Unlike #UKIP defections, Apple increasingly find it hard to keep
their product development plans secret. Then again, the design of the new Apple
Watch was a bit of a surprise. Amongst the pre-launch design photos on the web
was the ‘wrist band’ approach. What we got was a bog standard square design
which is pretty useless for people with stubby fingers. In future, perhaps
Apple's Chief Designer Sir Paul 'Jony' Ive would be better off looking at the
web for what the punters THINK he is going to design rather than ACTUALLY
designing things himself.

Here’s an interesting but, when you think about it, ultimately not surprising number (at least to me). In the global software space, industry specific software dominates. That is, software that can replace the customised software development which enterprises have traditionally done inhouse because ‘our organisational processes are unique to us!’ Of course, most enterprises buy in generic software e.g. MS Office suite but if you wrap up a service (like cloud storage for example) with some applications that supposedly understand the uniqueness of a sector you have more chance of winning a sale...Nothing new there then!