So essentially this is a niche to win strategy? Become the dominant player in your microcosm then continue to expand once dominance is achieved. I won't argue with this, it's not applicable to every pursuit, but solid advice on the whole.
If I understand you, I don't think that's the advice at all. I believe Newport's key point is NOT "win in a niche, use that as your base, leverage that to a wider context".
I believe the essence is this:
You're gonna hafta practice a ton anyway. So one way to decide how to focus your practice is to pick a microcosm with clear feedback, and go hard on that one type of practice. It's not about the (microcosmic) prize, it's about the focus that having a prize gives you in your preparation for the real fight, which you can get to in a few years. Thrashing during practice is as much a problem as thrashing during the fight for the thing itself.
While I think it's interesting advice, my thought is that for every opinion piece advocating laser focus, there's another opinion piece advocating dilettantism and adaptability and opportunism. It's hard to know how to add that up.
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but I am not sure the SEC can let go of so much control without significant regulation of some sort, specifically in reporting. It'll be interesting to see if the benefits actually outweigh the costs. I have to believe there will be reporting requirements and am not so confident that an artist could justify those costs to raise $50,000 or so..
Perhaps they purposely did not launch a SXSW to redirect the limelight from all the great apps that did to themselves, a mere week afterward. If this blogging, tweeting, posting frenzy continues then they are going to be nearing $41 million worth of marketing in a matter of days, making it potentially money very well spent.
I am excited to give this a try. As someone who did not study CS or MIS at school (in fact far from it, accounting & finance) I am open to any resource to assist code education online. I have found a few decent offerings such as w3schools.com, Mozila's p2p school of webcraft, and dreamincode.net but don't know if these will give me all I need..
On a side note if anyone has any other sites I should be considering, don't hesitate to shout them out!
Stanford has some top quality material up for CS. I have completed cs106a and am working on cs106b and they are both top notch!
http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx
If you are looking at more web based stuff then David Malan (Harvard) has some great free stuff as well.
http://cs50.tv/2010/fall/
MIT's Open Courseware is also top-notch stuff. The intro-to-CS and programming with Python has a set of lecture videos and assignments, I think there are a few others with lectures (including the famous 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)
It doesn't look like these are what you are looking for, but projecteuler.net and programmingpraxis.com are great. I imagine these are more for maintaining and honing skills, rather than building them, but still great.
I'm inclined to say the TouchWiz may not be all that bad, in fact some of the tweaks they made and features added could be quite welcome, but I cannot say I am a fan of Samsung getting into the OS realm even if they are trying to differentiate their tablets from other Android based tbls.
Good point regarding focusing on a niche. A niche is far easier to dominate than the general population, allowing you to refine your concept and then expand from there. Remember, FB didn't begin with 500 million members. It was initially available solely for Harvard students, then university students, and finally anyone.
Item #3 makes sense in that a lot of 'casual money' or individual traders do not have access to information about IPOs much less the ability to get involved in the offering. These investors previously were forced to use an advisor or at the very least a broker who is far more in tune with what is new on the market then the individual typically is.
