Mobile browser maker Opera has released its latest report on the mobile Web and this time it's come to a conclusion you'll arrive at soon enough as the family gathers for the holidays and everyone under 30 has their nose buried in a mobile phone - "Generation Y chooses the mobile Web".

In fact, most 18-27 year-olds surveyed in the report user their mobile phones to browse the Web more often than a desktop or laptop. The report offers a number of telling statistics on where the world is headed and it all boils down to one word - mobile.

According to Opera, the largest demographic of Opera users are between the ages of 18- and 27-years old in 13 countries representing major and emerging markets. The report highlights show mobile phones becoming ubiquitous in this generation, with definite variations:

• Almost 90% of respondents in the United States aged 18-27 have used their phones to share pictures. Of the profiled countries, Vietnam -- at 67% -- had the lowest use of mobile phones to share pictures.
• Respondents in the United States are least likely to have asked someone out on a date via SMS (44%). Respondents in China (84%), Germany (84%) and Vietnam (83%) are most likely to have used SMS texts to ask someone out on a date.

I had the privilege of joining the Monaco Media Forum in Monaco recently. It was a fairly star-studded event: opened and closed by Prince Albert, dinner at Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, great hotel etc. But to be honest it was the debates in the conference room that were the best thing about the event, and I had a lot of fun on my closing panel of the week: “Silicon Envy: Will Europe ever build the next new media giant?”

Now, admittedly with such a subject we had to run through the usual arguments, which I hope are now well known. Silicon Valley is the product of over 50+ years of history, Europe is only just getting going, America has one big unified market, Europe is splintered into many etc etc etc.

After an 11 day trial whose highlights included the hilarious “Where In The World Is HP CEO Leo Apotheker?“ the Oracle vs. SAP intellectual property case has finally ended today in a whopping $1.3 billion dollar verdict, “The largest amount ever awarded for software piracy” according to Oracle co-president Safra Catz.

Before the trial, SAP admitted that its 2005 acquisition TomorrowNow pirated Oracle’s intellectual property and used it in order to pilfer customers from Oracle. Evidence presented during the trial showed that key SAP executives were aware of what was happening. ““For more than three years, SAP stole thousands of copies of Oracle software and then resold that software and related services to Oracle’s own customers,” said Catz.

Even the tiniest gesture can say a lot about you. Carol Kinsey Goman, author of “The Nonverbal Advantage,” explains how to use body language to make a positive first impression at your next job interview.

From the teams of Innovation America and the Delmarva Group, Richard Bendis and JT Koffenberger wish you all a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving!!!

• The first Thanksgiving celebration can be traced back to the Plymouth Pilgrims in the fall of 1621.
  The celebration lasted for three days and included games and food.
• The first Thanksgiving feast was held to thank the Lord for sparing the lives of the survivors of the Mayflower, who landed at Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620. The survivors included four adult women and almost forty percent children.
• The Wampanoag chief Massasoit and ninety of his tribesmen were also invited to the first thanksgiving feast.
• Governor William Bradford invited them for helping the Pilgrims survive and teaching them the skills of cultivating the land.
• There were more Native Americans present than Pilgrims, 90 to 53.
• President George Washington.proclaimed the first 'National Day of Thanksgiving' in 1789.
• Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in his proclamation on October 3, 1863.
• The furcula of the turkey is used in a good luck ritual on Thanksgiving Day and has also been called a wishbone or merrythought.
• The Netherlands and Canada also have a Thanksgiving Day.

We know that email has done away with the nine to five job but does anyone ignore emails over holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving anymore? A new study by email software company Xobni suggests that going completely offline from email over the holidays may also be a thing of the past. According to the survey, 59 percent of U.S. working adults will check work email over holidays.

Of the survey respondents over half (55%) check work email at least once a day and more than one in four (28%) do so multiple times throughout the day. The data also showed that 79 percent of those that check email while on holiday stated that they have received a work-related email from a colleague or client on holidays.

THE ONLY IMPORTANT E-MAIL TO CHECK ON HOLIDAYS IS innovationDAILY........:).......HAPPY THANKSGIVING.......RICH BENDIS

A question at my recent social media strategy for non-profits training presentation at the Topeka Community Foundation was what steps one, two, and three should be when just starting developing a social media strategy.

Interestingly, the person asking the question speculated on the answer and was absolutely correct:

• Start by making sure your home base, your own website, is fantastic before you focus on establishing cool outposts on popular social networks where your target audience spends time.

This idea about fixing up your home was highlighted in the recent post on similarities in dating advice and social media strategy. You want to make sure you spruce up your home so that as a relationship which started someplace else advances, you have an attractive, welcoming place to invite someone to get to know each other better.

Smile & Move® is a reminder to happily serve. There are 5 ways to smile and 4 ways to move.

To smile is to wake up and be thankful. It's to be approachable and complain less (and smile more).

To move is to give more and exceed expectations. It's to have a sense of urgency in our efforts for others and to be more resourceful and resilient.

Join the thousands of people, companies, and schools already a part of the Smovement.

I love Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday. What’s not to love? Food, family, and football are three of my favorite things. The prodromal smells of homemade cooking pervade the house which means turkey and pecan pie are only days away. Smiling is easy this week while making sure everything is perfect for the welcome cacophony of our kids returning home for a holiday visit to our empty nest. Thanksgiving spirit warms the soul.

The best part of Thanksgiving is taking time to reflect on the things we’re most thankful for. It’s a strange tumultuous time and yet it seems as if there is more to be thankful for than usual. Perhaps it’s during trying times, with so many people suffering around us, that we are grateful for things we otherwise would take for granted. I am thankful for many things and thought if I shared them openly perhaps others would share what they are thankful for too. Who knows, maybe the Thanksgiving spirit will catch on.

You never really know what to expect when you become an entrepreneur.

Some challenges are easy to see coming – things like difficulties building brand recognition, finding people you can trust and having the infrastructure necessary to support growth. But the real hurdles are the things you never anticipated. They vary from company to company, but here are five problems I never expected as an entrepreneur and the lessons they taught me.

Alarms going off in the middle of the night. Entrepreneurs expect to work long hours – that’s what it takes to build a successful business. What you don’t expect is the 3 a.m. crisis. I’m a businessman, not the President of the United States, right?

“Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation” (Again, and again, and again…)

Have you seen the news? Read the articles? Heard the talking heads?

They say young people are “lazy” and “entitled”. It’s said that young people – the entire generation – will never amount to much.

I came across a Time Magazine article the other day that really bothered me. It was another older person talking down to my generation. The article described us this way: “They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder.” It said we’re a generation that “postpones growing up” pointing out that “fully 75% of young males 18 to 24 years old are still living at home, the largest proportion since the Great Depression.” We’re apparently the “New Petulants” because we “can often end up sounding like whiners.”

What?! We’re “whiners” just because we don’t want to live the same lives as our parents?!

As the season of Thanksgiving approaches, Americans may be unaware of the role that agricultural technology plays in making their family meal possible. Thanks to remarkable innovations in agriculture over the past century, each acre of farm land now supports two and a half more Thanksgiving feasts than it did just 50 years ago.

But many Americans may also be unaware that failed harvests in Russia have again sent world food prices soaring. Or that the fertilizer used to grow the food on their table is helping to wipe out marine ecosystems in our streams and estuaries. Or that the carbon-rich topsoil that is vital for many crops is being depleted at an astonishing rate. They even may not know that climate change threatens to intensify regional drought and flooding, risking global food shortages, or that the resulting price fluctuations will exacerbate chronic hunger, potentially leading to civil unrest and instability.

Indeed, while agricultural innovations have made it possible for 6 billion humans to live comfortably on the same land that once supported only 1.5 billion, many challenges remain to ensuring our global food system continues to support our society in a sustainable way.

We used to complain about all the useless back-to-back meetings and being copied on hundreds of unnecessary emails. Now we long for those days. We used to say there’s no such thing as over-communication. Now we’d do anything to make it stop.

Communication is out of control and it’s taking all the fun - and productivity - out of work.

Don’t get me wrong, communication is as important to business success and organizational effectiveness as it used to be. There’s just too much of it. For whatever reason, the old problem of protecting domains by limiting the flow of information has morphed into a new problem of hyper-collaboration where everybody’s included in everything.

PitchBook has published its 4Q 2010 Private Equity Presentation Deck. Please feel free to utilize these slides for conferences, board meetings and other PE-related presentations. The slides were all sourced from the PitchBook Platform and cover trends in private equity fundraising, investment, and exits. For this 4Q deck we have also added new slides covering PE and VC fund returns.

Click Here to Download The PE Presentation Deck - 6.5MB

Steve from Openmedia.ca sez, "As result of a recent decision by Canada's telcom regulator, the CRTC, Bell Canada and other big telecom companies can now freely force Internet usage-based billing on YOU and indie ISPs. This means we're looking at a future where Internet providers will charge per byte, the way they do with smart phones. If we allow this to happen Canadians will have no choice but to pay more for less Internet. This will crush innovative services, Canada's digital competitiveness, and your wallet. Canadians should sign the Stop The Meter petition!"

When it comes to companies concerned with managing their brand image online, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has some advice: "Make stuff that doesn't suck."

"More than ever before, people like to talk about stuff that sucks," Wales told Fast Company following a recent talk at the Digital Hollywood conference in New York City. "There's nothing to be done about it, except making a better product."

Wales attended the conference to introduce his own better product: Wiki 2.0, the latest set of collaborative publishing tools for his for-profit venture Wikia. The site, essentially Wikipedia-without-limits, receives roughly 36 million monthly visitors, and now offers a slew of new and improved social features, from polls and top 10 lists to video content and achievement badges.

Now that electric cars have hit the mainstream, it raises the question, what about other forms of transportation running on electricity? Specifically, will we ever see electric planes flying over the horizon?

Believe it or not, they’re already here. The battery-powered Yuneec E430 two-seater is currently in production (you can fly away with one for less than a hundred grand). And the Antares 20E sailplane has electric propulsion that can take it to 10,000 feet.