Subway Omnibus

• A Sotheby's For Inventors -- Ocean Tomo is looking to take advantage of your patents. The firm wants to be the auction house for patents. Many businesses with a wealth of dusty (and not so dusty) patents are going to Ocean Tomo looking for a sale. For once, market demand is driving the value of patents.
• Is Verizon a Network Hog? -- what's with the network-nazis lately? Verizon wants to prioritize traffic running over its network, giving itself 80% of the capacity for its own traffic -- everybody else, gets to fight over the remaining 20%. WTF?!
• Why The Economy Is a Lot Stronger Than You Think -- BusinessWeek's cover article declares that we're worrying too much about the economy. The traditional measures of an industrial economy doesn't necessarily apply in a knowledge-based economy. While that may shed a warm glow on economic thinking, it could also mean that today's (and tomorrow's) economy could be a lot more volatile than we may be comfortable with.
• The New Ethics Enforcers -- ah, how business has changed ...
• No Union, Please, We're Wal-Mart -- an excerpt from Anthony Bianco's The Bully of Bentonville. The story of how Wal-Mart left Jonquière after the Quebec government certified the store as only unionized Wal-Mart in North America.
• Creativity Loves Constraints -- a short article by Google's VP of Products and User Experience, Marissa Ann Mayer.

  Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome. Creativity thrives best when constrained. But constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Too many curbs can lead to pessimism and despair. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or accept gives rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional, or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to revolutionary change.