Serving pancakes like Prince. Find me on FB if you want some of this wrath.

But brightest spotlight might be owed to the announcement of Wholesale Applications Community, an agreement between 24 large industry players, consisting mostly of mobile operators but also a handful of handset majors (LG, Samsung, SE) who have neither wholeheartedly committed to Android nor developed a mature alternative, to create a standard for applications that will run on different OSes. Undoubtedly a move to turn the very tides that have turned against operators, control having shifted and continuing to shift toward disruptive handset manufacturers and search/ad networks (i.e. Apple, Google, and the like), and one which reflects how dire the situation is for operators, considering:

1. Data is important as ever as voice revenues continue to decrease and messaging flattens out in US/WEU, making applications and search revenues critical
2. Operators are increasingly pushed to the margins in apps. Fees made on data transfer–an operator sweet spot–while traditionally soaking up 50% to 60% of total app revenue, are expected to drop in share in the next few years, making way for content premiums and advertising revenues. I’ve got some data from Strategy Analytics showing revenues from data transfer falling 10% every 4 to 5 years. It’s precipitous.
3. In search, I doubt the picture is any different. I’d feel comfortable with putting my money on search engines and ad networks as key beneficiaries.

All of this makes WAC big news. A difficult plan to follow through given their unacquaintance with software and the sheer number of founding members and platforms that this new standard needs to meet–we already see some of the difficulties Adobe faces with mobile Flash, even from its dominant base in PC. Things will, of course, get easier once they hook, say, Android as an anchor adopter, not inconceivable considering 10 out of 24 members are also part of the Open Handset Alliance.

“Combined with the opening ceremony, NBC averaged 30 million viewers for the first two days of the Vancouver Games, the most for a non-U.S. Winter Olympics since the tabloid-fueled 1994 Lillehammer Games (39.9 million). The 30 million is 33% higher than the two-day average viewership from Torino (22.6 million).” Broadcasting & Cable

“CBS’ coverage of Super Bowl XLIV was watched by an estimated 106.5 million viewers, making it the most-watched program in [US] television history.”

TV, unlike the papers, still got it. Never lost it.

“Indeed, the U.S. sells almost all the chicken feet it produces to China, where they can fetch around 65 cents-70 cents per pound, compared to the 2 cents a pound they would sell for domestically, where they are rendered into such products as animal feed. In the first seven months of 2009, the U.S. exported 436,544 tons of chicken worth $376 million to China, about half of which was chicken feet.”

Which, of course, upsets Chinese farmers, prompting MOFCOM to levy taxes on US poultry producers proportional to business and benefit they bring to China, taxes ranging from 40 to 80%.