Everyone's looking for a bit of the transaction spike.

It's still several years before carriers come close to emulating the success Apple has had in digital music.

The closed carrier portals and the limited interfaces make it difficult for new brands to break in. But as we get more powerful browsers and more powerful phones, we'll have new ways to seek out content. We'll start seeing new business models and new entrepreneurs.

As the e-commerce market matures, you're going to see more software package solutions. Even Oracle is getting into the applications business. There is much more packaging on the software side to facilitate seamless scalability.

It doesn't provide any compelling advantage for consumers. We don't see it playing a role on the consumer PC or other appliances in near future.

A site that wants to prepare for rapid traffic expansion will want to make sure that it has internally all the systems it needs to handle that traffic when it comes.

When you look at the enabling technologies for live voice, most consumers have speakers, many have a microphone, but how you get them to work is another thing.

Phone.com is going against some well-capitalized and profitable entities -- Nokia (NOK) and Ericsson. It obviously felt that having more heft would help it to compete with software developers. And Software.com gets an entry into the wireless infrastructure space -- a space that everyone wants to play in. The combined entity will have its work cut out for it.