Dan Chung:

2012 has been the year that smartphones have started to dominate the world of still photography. Kodak has fallen apart, the cheap digital camera market is in decline, Facebook has offered $1 billion for Instagram. How would a smartphone camera in the hands of a professional photographer perform during this year’s biggest sporting event?

Charles Murray:

The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.

“Lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole” is produced by a relatively small set of important achievements that we can rightly attribute to our own actions. Arthur Brooks, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has usefully labeled such achievements “earned success.” Earned success can arise from a successful marriage, children raised well, a valued place as a member of a community, or devotion to a faith. Earned success also arises from achievement in the economic realm, which is where capitalism comes in.

Evgeny Morozov:

The recipe is simple. Find some peculiar global trend—the more arcane, the better. Draw a straight line connecting it to the world of apps, electric cars, and Bay Area venture capital. Mention robots, Japan, and cyberwar. Use shiny slides that contain incomprehensible but impressive maps and visualizations. Stir well. Serve on multiple platforms. With their never-ending talk of Twitter revolutions and the like, techno-globalists such as Khanna have a bright future ahead of them.

John Torinus:

Health care inflation in the Milwaukee area has dropped from double-digit to single-digit percentages, and there’s no big mystery why.

There is a thundering stampede in the private sector toward real reforms of the failed business model for the delivery of health care. It’s reform from the bottom up versus mandates from the mandarins in Washington D.C. It’s all about pragmatic solutions to the root cause problem: costs that have screamed upward for four decades.

The telling statistics are spelled out in the 10th rendition of HCTrends, an analysis put together by Pewaukee-based Benefits Services Group that probes Milwaukee area health care delivery. The increases in 2012 are expected to be in the 5% to 7% range, compared to a high point of 17% in 2004 and 8% to 10% in 2011. That’s huge progress.

Catch the scene above the Duomo via this fourth panorama.

I was inspired to post these scenes after reading Machiavelli – S.P.Q.F. @ exurbs.com (Via Jasper Janssen and Horace Dediu). Florence was a wonderful place to simply wander.

Jean Louis-Gassee’s recent post on Apple’s financials along with Horace Dediu’s disappointment with their India strategy inspired a few thoughts on what a “market share” oriented iOS fall, 2012 announcement might look like.

My comment at Chateau Gassee:

Contemplating an Apple that goes for market share and does not leave a “price umbrella”, results, IMHO, the following iOS products this fall:

iPod Touch: (new name?): $199 on up. Now available in unlocked Wifi+3G (iPhone 5 is LTE/”4G”)

iPad: $299 on up with at least 2 form factors, LTE and wifi versions. At some point, there will be a larger version.

iPhone: Multiple form factors across the price points. Remember iPod starts at $49. I just gave the Samsung Galaxy SIII a spin. I understand the retail appeal of the larger screen, but agree with some that the form factor yields a “thumbless” wasteland – and I have not small hands/fingers.

Apple TV: Others have speculated far more intelligently than I.

Dear Leader’s analysis of the Sculley era’s numerous errors includes:

“The Mac-user interface was a 10-year monopoly,” says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.”

http://web.archive.org/web/20040201210852/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=4052227&p1=0

Does this year’s capex explosion imply going for market share? We will soon see.

Wild Card: 2G iPod: tiny with a few simple apps.

Doc Searls:

Wikipedia is imperfect in countless ways. But at least it works, and its unambiguous purpose is to serve as a record. Every article has a history, and every revision can be found. Searches across the whole of any article’s history (and across other variables) can be done. Again, it’s not perfect, but improving it isn’t out of the question, or in the hands of some .com or .org that might be sold.

So here’s what I’m thinking: Journalism, as a field, should be concerned with adding to the record that is Wikipedia. (Wikipedia clearly cares about journalism.) If you are a reporter or an editor, and you write something of worthy of citation in a Wikipedia article, maybe you should put it in there — or have somebody else do it — as a professional pro formality. Hey, why not?

The Economist:

AT SOME point in 2008, someone, probably in either Asia or Africa, made the decision to move from the countryside to the city. This nameless person nudged the human race over an historic threshold, for it was in that year—according to the United Nations, at least—that mankind became, for the first time in its history, a predominantly urban species.

It is a trend that shows no sign of slowing. Having taken around 200,000 years to get to the halfway mark, demographers reckon that three-quarters of humanity could be city-dwelling by 2050, with most of the increase coming in the fast-growing towns of Asia and Africa. Migrants to cities are attracted by plentiful jobs, access to hospitals and education, and the ability to escape the enervating boredom of a peasant’s agricultural life. Those factors are more than enough to make up for the squalor, disease and spectacular poverty that those same migrants must often at first endure when they become urban dwellers.