"There is a big shift from holding a phone to your ear to holding it in your hand"

--- David Edelstein of the Grameen Foundation, quoted in "Beyond voice", part of The Economist's special report on telecoms in emerging markets, September 26, 2009

“There is a big shift from holding a phone to your ear to holding it in your hand,” says David Edelstein of the Grameen Foundation. “It opens the door to information services. It’s not the web, but it’s a web of services that can be offered on mobile devices.”

"the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians"

--- Hal Varian, passim, e.g. interview with McKinsey Quarterly Jan 2009, "Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers"

Quote in context:

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.

Steve Lohr, "For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics", New York Times, August 5, 2009

Second Life mania... All dressed up, somewhere to go, not enough to say or do

--- Jonathan Grudin, HCI researcher at Microsoft, 3 June 2005, personal communication (with permission)

The complete quote: “Second Life mania parallels the virtual world enthusiasm of the mid to late Nineties: All dressed up, somewhere to go, not enough to say or do”