Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jul 13, 2012

Article of the Week
Twitter is building a media business using other people’s content (GigaOm)
Big Idea:  What do you get when you turn data into information and ultimately knowledge?  You become a media company, or at least that is the direction Twitter is heading.  Transitioning from an infrastructure and communication platform will help Twitter monetize those 140 character tweets!

Editor’s Choice Articles
What Exactly Is GitHub Anyway? (Techcrunch)
Big Idea:  Social coding or a social network for nerds?  GitHub is both.  And with a $100 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, it has validated that there may be more to GitHub than just source control.  Can GitHub take over social content creation?

Speech recognition anyone? AT&T opens up Watson API (GigaOm)
Big Idea:  AT&T’s move to open up it’s speech recognition via an application programming interface to developers could be the catalyst that makes the mouse and touch screen a thing of the past.  Well maybe not, but it should allow for any software developer to embed speech recognition into their platform without expensive licensing fees.

New York starts turning payphones into free Wi-fi hotspots (GigaOm)
Big Idea:  Finally a useful idea on how to replace a public payphone with wi-fi.  But this is just one of many efforts to provide free wi-fi.  I get the feeling that with too many options this will be more of a nuisance without a uniform infrastructure, especially when marketers are fighting for eyeballs.

The Sun Shines on ‘The Cloud’ (WSJ Online)
Big Idea:  100% up time is what we expect as consumers.  But with the recent Amazon cloud service outage that impacted companies like Netflix that is not the case.  So is cloud ready for primetime?  The answer is yes but the industry is still in its infancy and when compared to other utility growth like electricity, it is light years ahead.