Facebook is preparing for their big announcement today. We look in to see if it is a move that will change the digital economy or will it simply change the wuffie economy?

The authors suggest that government investment in science, technology and education should not be decreased and that the U.S. government should actually increase direct funding or incentives via tax credits to research and design in these areas.

A new 65-country study on payment cards has some numbers that surprised me — the number of payment cards in the world has grown to 7.4 billion, of which about 62% are debit rather than credit cards.  The study projects growth to 10.1 billion by 2014, largely (of course) because of possible growth in Asia. [...]

The Economist recently wrote on the success of the iPad as a vehicle for delivering magazines in digital form. Among the nuggets of information: In advance, Sports Illustrated had created a “a futuristic-seeming video of a hypothetical issue filled with whizzy graphics and interactive ads,” which turned to be close to the actual iPad-delivered product; [...]

Marguerite Reardon reports on a new bipartisan congressional bill H.R. 1521 that would ban new state or local taxes on wireless service. Average taxes for wireless services average more than 15% nationwide while other taxable goods average 7%. This puts wireless taxes into the category of “sin taxes” even though it has economic benefits for society.

Castro believes that current legislation on advertising could be detrimental for online businesses. Stricter privacy regulation for online advertising could reduce money that goes toward supporting free content or inexpensive content as well as applications and services. Castro also feels that this could reduce start up funding and the effectiveness of advertising.

Intel President Paul Otellini’s speech last Monday (text here; video here) expressing concern about the direction of public policy has gotten heavy ink in both the tech and the business press. Samples: Declan McCullagh, CNET: Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration Monday [...]

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), best-known in the U.S. as the descendant of the legendary Bell Labs, has a full-court press going on the Internet to promote its new book The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World, available for free via a community-building website. This description by one of the authors caught [...]

A couple of days ago, a post on Disabilities, Civil Rights, & the Kindle Letter recounted the story of the war that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is waging against university pilot projects that use the Kindle, with CRD taking the position that the projects  discriminate against the visually impaired in [...]

On June 29, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education sent out a general letter addressed to “Dear College or University President” expressing concern that “colleges and universities are using electronic book readers that are not accessible to students who are blind or have low vision,” and noting that this is “discrimination prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act.”