Wisconsin Agri-Business: South American Competition

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Larry Rohter takes us to Brazil where he explores the world’s new breadbasket.

Sometime over the next decade or so, Brazil, which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described as “an agricultural superpower” during a visit in October, hopes to pass the United States as the world’s largest agricultural producer. But the trend is far broader and can be felt also in parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, with a deep impact on the region’s economy and environment. And it has spurred a debate that has mainly focused on expansion into areas where the Amazon rainforest is thought to be jeopardized.
“There has been a silent revolution in the countryside” since the 1990’s, Brazil’s minister of agriculture, Roberto Rodrigues, said in an interview in the capital, Bras?lia. The past four or five years in particular, he said, have been “characterized by spectacular growth and a huge increase in demand” abroad for foodstuffs, which has given Brazil “the capacity to compete with anyone.”

Related Links: Alltheweb Clusty Google Teoma Yahoo

Madison WiFi RFP

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The State of Wisconsin Department of Administration Friday issued this RFP:
REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (RFP) For CITYWIDE WIFI ACCESS And DESIGN, INSTALL, OPERATE, MANAGE, MAINTAIN AND MARKET A COMMON WIRELESS ACCESS SYSTEM (CWAS) for DANE COUNTY REGIONAL AIRPORT [654K PDF]
I’ll post some comments after I’ve had a chance to review the document. Let’s hope this flies in a citizen friendly way (rather than the recent anti-citizen legislation that was passed in Pennsylvania).
It’s due January 10th, 2005. I wonder what the odds are on a SBC win (SBC is the incumbent, all powerful local telco. Local player TDS perhaps has a shot, along with others).
Esme Vos has already posted comments on the RFP. Via Glenn Fleishman

David Bernhardt: Clear Thinking on the Role of Sports in Society

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David Bernhardt offers some rather clear thinking on sports & society, in light of the recent Detroit NBA fight, steroids and the NHL strike:

What are our expectations of these athletes and our own son and daughters? Hopefully, it is to watch them compete, have fun and perform to the best of their natural ability. When society begins to focus on winning at all costs, we see where the fun leaves the sport, performance enhancement cheating begins and frustration of continual expectation boil over in an unexpected violence. In addition, the rapid firing of college coaches from an upstanding university where the student-athletes were students first and athletes second, makes one again question the values of the institutions of higher learning.

Politics & Money

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Governor Doyle’s recently announced plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on biotech initiatives evidently faces a small problem – the money must be found. Paul Gores digs in.
I think the state should focus on basically two things:

  • True broadband (2 way at 100mbps plus speeds – 100X today’s dsl/cable modems)
  • Simplify the taxes/paperwork for small businesses.

Marketing & Technology

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Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy is noted for his viewpoints on a variety of topics. One of my favorites is this: “The quality of a Company’s software has an inverse relationship to the amount of money spent on marketing.”
I often use this quote when speaking about our products and services as we try to be a function over form type of company. There are others like this, including Sybase. Sybase is not a household name vis a vis it’s database competitors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. However, it’s software runs some of the largest financial institutions along with our products.
Interestingly, Microsoft’s very popular SQL server was originally based on Sybase’s database (MS did a licensing deal with Sybase in the 1990’s. I wonder if Sybase would do that again today?)
Sybase is taking a bit more of an aggressive posture with small business opportunities. They now have a free linux version available. There are some limitations on this product (memory and database size), but for many projects, it’s potentially great place to start.
Free doesn’t pay the bills, so they do need to have a realistic glide path from “free” for a low end implementation to a pricing model that small businesses can actually afford. These are interesting times for many tech firms.